2nd Grade Crew // Interactive Math Notebooks

Second grade is delving deep into number sense and place value.  To promote student engagement, our class is using an interactive magic notebook in this unit.  The purpose of the interactive notebook is to enable students to be creative, independent thinkers and writers. The notebooks are used to keep track of information presented in class, as well as create activities and learning experiences that meet auditory, visual and kinesthetic learners’ needs.  Students can process the information presented in minilessons and have unique interactions with the information, as opposed to simply using a worksheet.  As an initial review, second graders have started out with number sense, identifying how to find 10 more, 10 less, skip count and identify odd and even numbers.  

Rather than labeling a worksheet, students glue pockets with materials that they can use kinesthetically to master the skills.  For example, they have a pocket that holds all numbers used skip counting by 5s from 5 to 100.  Each number is on a small square. They can take out the pieces, order them, move them around and manipulate the materials.  They then have these pieces that they can return to use as needed in this unit and throughout the year.They also use spinners and games to interact with the concepts in their own individual way.  In one lesson, they used a spinner to find a number.  Then students drew a pictorial form of the number using a ten frame and saw if that number could be separated into equal groups.  If it could, then they knew it was even!  This provides a much deeper understanding of even and odd numbers than just looking at the ones place in a number.  

In our most recent math activity, students used project based learning to solidify their knowledge of odd and even.  They created a monster using a spinner, which introduced the concepts of probability.   They then looked at the number of body parts their monster had to find our if it was odd or even.  For example, a student presented her math “m -odd- ster” by saying “My monster has 3 horns, so I know he has an odd number of horns”.

Using interactive notebooks has helped our crew become engaged in and excited for math every day!  They also are thrilled to be the creators of their own notebooks and take pride in making sure they are completing high quality work that demonstrates the mastery of the skills.