Happy November!
I am amazed that Friday was our 50th day of school already!!! As usual,
we've been busy in 2nd Grade...
We had a wonderful
time celebrating Halloween last week! The children enjoyed the Harvest Party
and looked awesome in their costumes. Thank you to everyone who helped to make
the party a success. We appreciate all of the donations and helpers. We look
forward to our next classroom party, the Winter Party, in December.
After spending
several weeks reading fictional texts during our Guided Reading groups and
focusing on story elements (characters, setting, problem, and solution) and
retelling, we moved onto nonfiction texts this week. This past week the
children worked on reviewing non-fiction text features (Glossary, Index, Headings,
captions, labels, Table of Contents, diagrams, maps, etc..) by doing a
scavenger hunt through a non-fiction text. We also had an opportunity to
read non-fiction texts in our groups and discuss the many new and interesting
things we learned.
Our math lessons have
been focused on subtraction strategies such as: counting back, counting up,
subtracting 0 and 1, and using what we know about Doubles Facts to help us
subtract. The kids also enjoyed playing 2 new games called Salute and
Subtraction Top-It. Ask them about these games, as they are great games to play
at home to practice their math facts! You can find the directions by logging
onto your child’s Everyday Math Account. Their login information is in their
Take Home Folders inside one of the plastic sleeves. Once you login, click on
the Everyday Math book image to enter the site. Your child should have
brought home their fact triangles last week. Using fact triangles is a
really great way to increase fact fluency. We hope you will pull them out every
once in a while to practice with your child. Second graders need to be
fluent (answer within a few seconds) all of their combinations of 10 facts and
their doubles facts by the end of
term 1.
During our writing
blocks, we have spent time continuing to work on the Looking Back personal
narrative stories that the children brainstormed for at home. The children are
doing an excellent job applying the learned structure of personal narrative
stories. We are currently working on revising and editing their work. Their
completed stories will become part of their writing portfolios that will be
sent home at the end of the year. We are also doing a fun writing story
about Thanksgiving. We look forward to sharing these stories with you at
conferences.
Our Science unit on
Plant and Animal Survival has come to an end. Our culminating activity
was to pick a habitat and create a diorama showing at least 1 plant and animal
that lives there and show how a plant depends on an animal or how an animal depends
on a plant. The kids did a great job writing short paragraphs about their
dioramas.
Now that our science
unit is complete we will begin our first social studies unit of the year,
Mapping. We started talking about this topic this past week, and we look
forward to some fun, interactive lessons coming up in the next few weeks.
Parent teacher
conferences are coming soon! The online sign-up will go live on November 12th
at 3:30. I look forward to meeting with
you to discuss the growth that your child has already made in Second
Grade.
Lastly, there will
be no spelling homework for next week, November 12th-15th. With the
shorter week we have decided to spend our spelling time in class doing some
assessing as we near the close of term 1.
Enjoy the long
weekend!
Upcoming Dates:
November 25th- No
School- Parent Teacher Conferences
November 26th- 2 Hour
Delay- Parent Teacher Conferences
November 27th- Turkey
Trot and Early Release for Thanksgiving Break
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