Here you will find some highlights from my monthly newsletters as well as some other classroom news to keep you up to date!
News!
Reach for the Stars
Our reading incentive is coming to an end and the 2nd grade will have read well over 500 books! Nothing can benefit our students’ literacy development more than reading text that is appropriate for them. Great work!
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!
Basic Addition and Subtraction Facts As our math curriculum becomes more involved, it will important for the students to increase their accuracy with basic number facts. I often hear that the math homework I send home is too easy, however if the students are still counting with their fingers, they have no mastered their basic addition and subtraction facts just yet! The amount of practice will be increasing and they will be working towards completing 100 basic facts in under six minutes. 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- October
Mathematics
We will begin our place value unit by exploring the various ways to show numbers. We will review standard form, a place value chart, base ten blocks, and expanded form. We will be exploring 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 also exploring more about numbers including concepts such as odd and even, greater than and less than, as well as ordinal numbers. We will be playing 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. Our next strategy will be the Drawing a Picture strategy and practicing explaining our mathematical thinking in words. 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.
Reader's Workshop We are starting Reader's Workshop in our classroom. The students have practiced shopping for books for the their book boxes, choosing "just right" books with the Five Finger Rule, and classifying books into various genres.
The first two reading strategies we have practiced is making predictions and monitoring our reading.
The Predicting Strategy
Students are very good at predicting what will happen next in the story, and we have begun to make predictions about what will happen even after the story is over. The students were excited to think that sometimes that stories aren't always over. Starting the year with this predicting strategy is the very beginning of teaching students how to make inferences about what they read. This is one of the biggest focuses of our reading comprehension work this year.
The Monitoring Strategy: Having "Huh?" Moments
The other strategy of monitoring our reading, the students will know as having "Huh?" moments. We practiced focusing in on our reading when we misread some of the words in our book. "Huh?" moments happen when the students' reading is slowed down and they might say "Huh?" in their minds. We talked about asking ourselves if the words we just read make sense, or if they sound right. The students did an amazing job on this and I am so proud of the way they are able to monitor their reading mistakes. I often celebrate these mistakes since this is how we learn to become better readers.
We are starting to use our binders to work on extension activities based upon the different books they are reading. Keep an eye out on the website for some fantastic student work in the upcoming weeks.
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 out in the hallway. The students will be surprised at how much writing they had done on this higher-level thinking writing assignment.
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 are finishing 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 will be writing 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 will experiment with writing “like a poet.” The poems are always amazingly written and the students get very excited about them. They will then extend 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 tends to happen.
Social Studies We will begin to discuss the importance of government, rules and laws. We will also be 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.
