Are you a handy person? Do you love woodworking and hardware stores? Did your child tell you about our mini lesson on measuring 3d objects? Many of you were volunteered by your children today! :) Last night, a cool Halloween idea was seen that the children would love to make. We discussed how measuring a shape and a solid differ in the extra dimension of depth. Your child should be able to explain and show you how to measure a rectangular prism (block or piece of wood) and say: width, height, and depth. Our example involved the numbers 3, 6, and 9. A few clever friends discovered that 3 families could each prep 9 for our class. Here is what we would love to find someone (or a team of handy families)to prepare for us: 26 (or 27 to maintain their math) blocks of wood that measure 3" deep by 6" wide and 9" tall. If you can help, then we would love it. The best time to have them arrive in our class is a week from Monday at the latest (2 weekends), but by next Friday would be much better (1 weekend). Thank you! Don't worry, the volunteered families were not recorded. :) The second grade heritage reports began today. They were amazing! You'll be able to enjoy them yourselves soon. The first graders and I are enjoying them and taking great notes. Their turn will be in December and tied to family traditions. (FYI - It had to remain only second grade due to the fact that the same thing is done every year and would be redundant for first graders next year.) Between now and then, we will all be working on a very special joint social studies project that combines the social studies standards related to life long ago (for us- "change over time"). Tomorrow is your last day of the week, but homework can be turned in either tomorrow or Monday. The discussion based on the flipped videos was terrific today. Your child has hints of what we will be doing next week as we wrap up a rock solid unit (pun intended and 1/4 of the purpose of the last video) on how rocks "change over time". All are related to the last video and explain the purpose in case you were wondering why it was there. :) From rocks, we will spend a week or two on the upcoming Presidential election process and purpose (not opinions). It would be foolish not to teach government while the elections are occurring. From there, we will travel back in time. Just a reminder that the words for the spelling test are indeed the same for two weeks at a time. Tomorrow will be the dictation test which will also review some important high frequency words already "learned".