How is it already February? In reading this week we will study the essential question, How does weather affect us? We will work with long /e/ spellings, review asking and answering questions as we read, and bring together our work with verbs (past, present, future). Next week the second grade team will meet to further review student progress and make adjustments to our WIN reading groups. Overall, the students are making strong gains, and we are happy with the progress we see.
Next week in math we will work to solve number stories. We will investigate stories where two parts are listed and we find the total. An example would be: Joe had 17 marbles. His sister gives him 13 more. How many marbles does Joe have now? As well, we will solve stories where one part and the total is listed, and we must find the missing part. An example would be: Joe has 17 marbles. His sister gives him some more marbles. Now Joe has 30 marbles. How many marbles did his sister give him? We also continue to build our fact fluency. I will introduce the students to another online resource called xtra math. This program allows students to build their fact fluency and progress at their own rate. It moves from basic addition through division. I will send home login information once we have had a chance to practice in the classroom. Did the kiddos share that we began to make our Valentine’s Day baskets with our buddy class? It is an amazing project to complete with the help of our older friends! We will have our Valentine’s Day Party on Friday, February 13th from 1:15-2:00. The students will make a simple craft, enjoy some treats, and open up their special cards from classmates. I will send out a signup genius link in the next few days. I will send home a class list in the student folders to help facilitate Valentine's Cards. Have a great week!
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This week in the Wonders reading program we will examine the essential question: How can people help out their community? As we read we will work on asking questions to clarify our thinking and review the difference between thick (meaningful, thoughtful) and thin (surface) questions. Our spelling focus for the week will be long /o/. We will learn about past tense verbs, and compare this to our work that we did last week with present tense verbs. As well, we will learn about using contractions with the word not.
This week in math, we will shift our focus toward mentally adding and subtracting 10 and 100. The students will revisit open number lines (a number line without set numbers on it) to concretely show their thinking when adding and subtracting 10 and 100. This is an important first step as students move to mental math. We are focused on understanding the concept, in order to apply it broadly to any number, and not memorizing a set group of numbers. We will wrap up the week using these strategies during change to more (addition) number stories. We continue our writing work this week by discussing author’s voice. We will decide what it means when an author has voice, and how we can borrow this craft move in our own writing. This week we will start a two week STEM challenge that ties in with our reading and science curriculum. Students will be asked to reuse common materials to create an instrument. I can’t wait to see what they come up with! This week we will continue our reading work in Wonders. Because of the amount of assessment last week, we extended our Wonders question of What can we see in the Earth's sky to span this week as well. This week we will wrap up our work with the plot of the story, focusing on problem and solution. As well, we will continue to practice similes and present tense verbs. The students reviewed the spellings for long /i/ last week, and this will be the focus of our spelling test this week.
We will begin a new unit in Math tomorrow. The focus of this unit will be on the application of the addition strategies we have learned. Students will use money to make coin calculations, count up to make change, and identify the coins they would need to purchase items. If your child is still working to identify coin names and values, I will send home extra practice this week. We hope to complete the stories we have been working on this week. The students will create an independent sample of narrative writing to be scored at the beginning of next week. It is so encouraging to watch their ability, confidence, and enjoyment of writing grow! Thank you for the many items that have been donated to our class theme basket. I have included a picture of all of the items below. It looks as if we only need a box of colored pencils and cello wrap to bring our basket to completion. If you have any of these items to donate, please let me know! Thank you for your thoughtfulness with your children’s snow gear. Recess is quite cold, and those snow pants help keep the students warm outside. We try to get the kiddos out for as many recess periods that are safe- those bodies need to move!
Next week will be a different type of week for us. We will be busy with assessments and will spread our Wonders work over a two week period. For this reason, the students will not have a spelling list next week. Instead the list will come home the following week. I will send home supplemental homework in it's place. Over the next two weeks in our Wonders reading program our learning question is, “What can we see in the sky?” We will focus on long /i/ spellings, present tense verbs, and commas in a series. As well, we will review what the plot of a story is (beginning, middle, and end). In Math, we will take our Unit 4 assessment and our cumulative assessment. This will be completed in smaller chunks of time spread throughout the week. I will pull small groups for reteaching and enrichment throughout the week. During writing this week, we will polish our lead sentences and complete our paragraph that goes with it. Students are formally taught (and expected to write in) paragraph form during third grade. This serves as only an introduction. On a final note, some students will be taking the winter NWEA assessment. This is the computer-based assessment that the students took for the first time in the Fall of Second Grade. I have selected only some students to check on during this benchmark, as I am either monitoring their growth more closely, or feel that their Fall score was not an accurate representation of their ability. Not all students will be tested. Some will test for reading, some for Math, and some for both subjects. Please feel free to let me know if you have any questions. Welcome back!, I am excited to see the students tomorrow! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday break. I was able to visit with my family, which is always the best part of the holiday season.
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