Here you will find some highlights from my monthly newsletters as well as some other classroom news to keep you up to date!
Special Feature Kids at Work- November
Social Studies I hope you enjoyed having your students come home and be so knowledgeable about this year's election. They impressed me everyday with their passion and dedication to the topic of U.S. Government. They learned a lot about the two candidates that were running as well as the political parties and electoral votes. To explain this complicated process, we referred to the electoral votes of each state as marbles. That helped the students learn the importance of campaigning in certain battleground states. We culminated this unit by writing three paragraph letters to President Elect Obama.
Mathematics This month we will be working on understanding numbers and the concept behind their value. We are exploring ideas such as greater than, less than and equal to, value, odd and even and the ways to show a number. Our base ten blocks have been a great help in this process. The students are creating the foundation knowledge for our next unit: Addition with Regrouping. We are continuing our problem solving skills each day and we are now focusing on step 4: putting our mathematical processes into words. This is the toughest part of problem of the day and the students are making great strides.
Reading and Writing
We began our Nature Walk theme with a series study of the Frog and Toad books. We used these books to answer various reading response prompts and to help us practice writing literary letters. We also read our first nonfiction story called Exploring Parks with Ranger Dockett. Then students listened to the story Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping and wrote about what would happen if Amelia Bedelia had Ranger Dockett's job. What a mess that would be! We also continued writing poems for our published books. We wrote story acrostic poems about Fall and Haiku poems about Nature.
Science
The students learned about frogs and toads and their cycles. They read a nonfiction article comparing frogs and toads and highlighted important information. They then wrote their first comparison/contrast essay of the year for our new bulletin board. The students were surprised at how much writing they had done in this higher-level thinking writing assignment.
Special Feature Kids at Work- October
Mathematics
We began our place value unit by exploring the various ways to show numbers. We have reviewed standard form, a place value chart, base ten blocks, and expanded form. We have explored the concept of value and the students also participated in an activity focusing on the regrouping of units into longs using base ten blocks. We are exploring more about numbers including concepts such as odd and even, greater than and less than, as well as ordinal numbers. We will be beginning to play a game called "Race to a Flat" that helps students know when to regroup. We have also continued our problem solving practice with Problem of the Day and Head Scratchers. The students are developing nicely in both of these areas. For more information, please visit our Mathematics Curriculum Highlights page.
Reading and Writing We will begin our Nature Walk theme with a series study of the Frog and Toad books. We will use these books to answer various reading response prompts and to help us practice writing literary letters. We will also read our first nonfiction story called Exploring Parks with Ranger Dockett. Then students will listen to the story Amelia Bedelia Goes Camping and will write about what would happen if Amelia Bedelia had Ranger Dockett's job. What a mess that would be! We will also continue writing poems for our published books. We will write story acrostic poems about Fall and Haiku poems about Nature.
Science The students learned about frogs and toads and their life cycles. They will read a nonfiction article comparing frogs and toads and highlighted important information. They will then write their first comparison/contrast essay of the year for our new bulletin board. The students will be surprised at how much writing they had done in this higher-level thinking writing assignment.
News!
Reach for the Stars
Our reading incentive is coming to an end and the 2nd grade will have read over 1,000 books! Nothing can benefit our students’ literacy development more than reading text that is appropriate for them. Great work!
The Spuccicard: Priceless
The students have been making such wise financial decisions in our class economy that I decided to give them some extra responsibility by allowing them each to have a Spuccicard Credit Card. The students are able to charge whatever they would like in the Spucci store to their credit card, but if after a month they cannot pay their debt, the bill doubles. I look forward to seeing the students budget their tickets accordingly.
Reading Twenty Minutes Each Night Although our reading incentive program is coming to an end, students should still be reading for at least twenty minutes each evening. Please continue to fill out the reading logs and let me know if you need more. When the students complete one full side of the reading log, they will receive a ticket from me. Thanks for your support and encouragement!
Math Facts As our math curriculum becomes more involved, it will important for the students to increase their accuracy with basic number facts. This can be accomplished by having them practice with various worksheets, games, and flashcards. If you need extra resources for this practice, please feel free to let me know!
Special Feature Kids at Work- September
Mathematics Since our basic addition and subtraction facts are something we will be reviewing throughout the school year, we are not spending a long time on these two units. We finished up our basic addition review and we are on to reviewing subtraction and fact families. We have also begun to practice our Problem of the Day activities. Students are beginning to identify and complete the first three steps to problem solving which are:
Writing what the question is asking and identifying signal words
Identifying the important information
Picking a strategy to solve the problem
Explaining our answer in words
We are off to a great start at becoming super second grade mathematicians!
Reading and Writing We have begun our Silly Stories theme, which is our first theme for the year. We are meeting many different characters that are very entertaining. The students are learning how to respond to various constructed responses prompts that require them to relate the stories we have read as a class to their own lives. This helps develop their voice and their writing skills, as well as deepen their comprehension. We have also begun practicing our predicting strategy with our post-it notes. By practicing as a whole class, students will feel more comfortable doing this independently during Reader’s Workshop.
Poetry Integration The students wrote their first poems entitled “I Wish.” This is a list poem, where each line starts the same way. After listening to an excerpt from the book Poetry Matters by Ralph Fletcher, they experimented with writing “like a poet.” The poems are amazingly written and the students were very excited about them. They then extended the concept of list poems when they chose their own topics, after listening to the mentor text “Some Things Just Don’t Make Sense” by Judith Viorst. The students choose from titles like “Beauty is…” “I Want…” or “Things That Scare Me.” It was within these Writer’s Workshop moments where magic happened.
Social Studies We continued to discuss the importance of government, rules and laws. We also are practicing identifying the names of our town, state, and country. We are then identifying the leaders of each of these and why they are important. We will also be discussing the roles of the President and Congress, as well as writing our own bills. Classmates will then get to decide if each bill should become a law, or if it should be vetoed. Some great words to review are: mayor, governor, Congress, President, law, rule, and citizen.
