High Ability Update

High Ability Redetermination Year - 2nd Grade

Second grade students who are currently in High Ability will be receiving a letter to make parents or guardians aware of how their child previously qualified. Was it through NWEA? CogAT? Both? It will help you monitor and track how your child is doing on the NWEA test. Second grade students start taking the English Language Arts section of the test which is required to qualify for High Ability in third grade. It will also let you know if you have a student who qualified through the Cognitive Abilities Test (CogAT). Second grade students will take this test again towards the end of the school year. Decisions for high ability placement of second graders for third grade will be done at the end of the school year by our High Ability Cadre. Letters will go home the last week of school.

If you have any questions about your child's scores or how to read them, please contact Mrs. Holly Koedyker, hkoedyker@duneland.k12.in.us. For more information about HA identification, see the link below.

To see students this young stand before a group of their peers and present a project is so rewarding! This project has been a really great experience for these kids:) I'm going to display their shields of connections on the wall of our HA classroom for awhile before sending them home.

Explaining our thinking is a skill we work on in HA math. Our HA math curriculum has Think Deeply Questions that require the students to explain their math in words. This week, we answered a question that referred back to the Lingo (polygon bingo) game. We worked as a whole group to answer the question in words. After that, we moved on to making our own polygon manipulatives. Students are folding and cutting to create polygons. We will be using the handmade manipulatives to investigate composing and decomposing shapes.

The Tale of Despereaux by Kate DiCamillo is the first of two novel studies we will have in HA this year. It is going to be a great experience! In order for us to have the best experience possible, it is important we are all in the same place in our reading. Please help support your HA student by making sure they do their assigned reading. Current homework assignment: read through chapter 9 by Monday (do not read chapter 10). I have asked the students to resist the urge to read ahead. Thank you for your support:)

Second graders often want to race full speed ahead and memorize multiplication facts. While memorizing is fine, it doesn’t teach how to multiply. On Wednesday, I introduced how to multiply.

The students and I previously worked together to read a myth and compete a retelling story map. This week, students worked in pairs/small groups to read a different myth and complete a retelling story map. By breaking down these difficult myths, students are able to comprehend better than if they had just simply read the myths.

Students played a few more rounds of Card Capers before I gave them a challenging word problem pertaining to the game. We discussed different approaches to solve the problem. One student explained his thinking by describing making an organized list, but did not use the term organized list. After that student spoke, another student used the term organized list. So proud of them:). Students worked in pairs work on the problem. It is a doozy of a question, but these students are up to it! They will finish this next week. The focus of this lesson is to reinforce and deepen their understanding of place value.

After a prefix/suffix activity, I gave the students a writing prompt. They will finish their writing in HA class on Monday. I am keeping their papers as a writing sample. This gives me perspective on their current skills, so I can plan accordingly. Although we do follow the IDOE HA curriculum, I may have snippets of time here and there to supplement.

We are wrapping up our language of algebra lessons and will be moving on with our HA curriculum very soon. The students most recently worked in pairs/small groups to assign variables to word problems. For example, at this point, many students understand that n, n + 1, n + 2, n + 3, and n + 4 represent five consecutive numbers. If we want to represent five consecutive odd numbers or five consecutive even numbers, the language would be n, n + 2, n + 4, n + 6, and n + 8. If Sally is y years old and Sally's brother is three years older, Sally's brother is y + 3 years old.

We are running low on boxes of tissues and quart & gallon size ziplocs, if you would like to send some in. Thank you so much for asking:)

Email: kapeterson@duneland.k12.in.us
Location: Jackson Elementary School, North 400 East, Valparaiso, IN, USA
Phone: 219-983-3680