Hello Families!

Review of week 6/1-4:

MATH: we are finishing the year with money and buying from the Toy Store.  It has been fun and the kids ask for more.  An important introduction this week has been in how to make change to $1.00; we are using coins to count forward and number lines to help.

 

WORD WORK:  We have finished our syllables and word parts and taken a final quiz. Your student should have brought that home Friday.  Some are continuing to work on finishing their narratives, some are working on plant and animal haikus, and a few have started their personal similie prose. We will use this prose for our final tech. training time with Ms. Abby this week.

 

GUIDED READING: Groups are still going strong, imbedding strategies and techniques for decoding, fluency, and comprehension; hopefully your student can engage with these strategies during their independent reading time for continued personal growth.  

 

IB UNIT:  HOW WE EXPRESS OURSELVES: This week our focus was on the form and function of plants: what plant parts do, how plants survive and reproduce.  After learning about the value and function of pollination, we dissected a variety  of flowers and discovered the unique ways each flower encourages a polinator visit and found the unique shapes of each flower's pistil and stamen.  This week we will be finishing with biomimicry and reflecting on our unit.

 

In 2nd grade, we are working on gift giving...the intangible kind:  how giving and getting gifts of time, kind words, support, throughful & helpful actions, and empathy make us feel. Students are nominating others (anonymously) for a 'gift' they saw or 'were given' and we are posting little gift icons  outside our door to show all the giving we are doing.  We will continue this focusing on intangible gift giving this week.

 

 

Happy End-of-May Everyone!

As you can imagine with our beautiful weather and anticipation of summer, the kids are in high energy mode and yet, most continue to demonstrate an active engagement in class activities with focused work and class participation...very impressive! This seems especially true in our How We Express Ourselves study and in math; we are able to now work together in small groups which may be contributing to the continued excitment for learning. Or it could be the interest in the content (nature's design and animal/plant adaptations; fractions). Whatever it may be, it is a joy to have so much interest, curiosity, and positive participation from the students just days away from the end of the year!

 

We had some special events this week at which your children shone! 

 

Otter Creek Audubon Society respresentatives, Kathy and Gary Starr, came for a morning visit in the tent. They brought bird 'parts' for the students to explore within the theme of Form with Function. Gary is a professional bird carving artist and brought some blanks of his ornaments; students expressed their creative sides with original bird ornaments of their own. (They also created really beautiful 'bird-themed' thank you cards for our visitors!) I hope your student has shared their new knowledge of John James Audubon and his contribution as an early American naturalist explorer.

 

We observed Memorial Day on Friday with a beautiful ceremony outside with presentations from each class. Your students were impressive in their original 'Memorial Day Haikus/Meditation Flags' presentation to the school; they were professional in their public speaking and respect for the event.  Big thank you to Mr. Lenox for encouraging the time for  study and observation of this important day and to all the other classes for their informative and creative contributions.

 

With all of our focus on the natural world right now, I hope your students are sharing their new awareness with you about the natural 'magic' happening right now in our own backyards! We have been looking at the specifics of plants: pollination and purpose of flowers (we dissected a peony blossom to find the reproductive parts), how seeds travel, and purpose of plant structures. We have explored mimicry in plants and animals for safety and reproduction purposes.  This week we will delve into biomimicry and start exploring the consistent designs found in nature.

 

MATH: Fraction comparisons and connections to 'the whole' - whether in fraction strips, money, food, even paper folding - was our concluding math theme this week. Understanding equality of divisions and value of the size of a part (1/4 is smaller than 1/3 even though the whole number 4 is bigger than a 3) are challenging concepts and will continue to be built upon in coming years.  We also continue to explore area models connecting repeated addition to an introduction to multiplication.

 

WRITING:  We are finishing our narratives. We are writing in response to our reading; learning to respond to comprehension questions with deep thinking, details from the text, and complete sentences.

 

Hopefully, you found the new form of the class assignments chart this week useful. Thank you for your suggestions on scaffolding; it inspired this new format. The children seemed to find it very productive; one student noticed..."this is helping us get Friday Fun!" With the mini-goals/outdoor rewards of daily completed classwork; students, on the whole, improved on focused work in class with the more 3 hours of independent work time provided over the course of the week. They are showing real commitment to and pride in their independence in learning. There is no homework other than the daily Guided Reading expectations (or pleasure reading, of course!)

 

Enjoy your long weekend!  Please keep me informed on anything you feel might be important to your student in our final days together.  Your contributions are invaluable!

 

Hello All!

HOT and busy week. For focus, productivity and most importantly, health and comfort, water bottles are an essential daily tool to have in class. Please let me know if I should provide one for your student.

 

MATH: VERY productive small group fraction work all week and a fun game with fractions on Friday...many students took the game home to play with you.  I hope you enjoyed it!  

 

WORD WORK: We have completed the 2nd grade Fundations expectations for the year!  Along with the the review of 1st grade and new lessons from the final months of 1st grade, we have accomplished a LOT. As a class we celebrate daily the growth we see in our decoding, fluency, and spelling skills.

      Now we will be spending time with syllabication which really helps with decoding and spelling!  HAIKU poems are a new and fun way to practice understanding syllables and developing our vocabulary; it is surprisingly challenging brain work to find 17 syllables in the right order to fully and creatively express a complete idea with feeling!  Memorial Day poems is our current project; animal and plant adaptations are on deck.

    Our narratives are finishing up; we have been applying our new store of knowledge in adjectives, adverbs, exciting verbs, and complete sentences to improve our expression in an original story.  Patience with drafts, editing, and revising is a new, challenging learning process and will continue to be more and more important as time goes on.

IB - How We Express Ourselves:  this 2nd grade unit is primarily about plant adaptations, survival, and reproduction.  However, as the 1st grade animal adaptation unit was lost due to Covid last year, we will be doing a bit of that as well; we have visitors coming this week to share their knowledge on bird-part form and function! As this unit is titled '...express ourselves...', our work has an important personal expression and design component as well.

 

APPROACHES TO LEARNING (ATLs): As a class, we are working on problem solving that can impact and improve our work and time together.  We had a very successful 'problem solve' last week: relearning how to line up in a timely and quiet way.  We talked it though, decided together on a reasonable expectation, and the rewards to achieving those expectations.  The kids are really proud of how they designed clear and specific goals so at the end of the day we could gauge our achievements! I hope your student will explain our problem solving process to you and how we are solving the line-up challenge.

 

Independence and responsibility to our own learning is also a priority ATL theme right now.  Friday Fun is the reward for thinking ahead and learning to use time wisely in class to achieve a short term (one week) goal of extra time outside on Fridays.  The great thing about this short goal is that we all get to start fresh every Monday! Most work assigned in class is meant to be completed in class; if a student is using the daily independent work time provided  (usually anywhere from 40-60+ minutes a day) in a productive way, all daily work should be able to be completed without work to take home. However, if time was perhaps not used well, students have the choice to take a little catch up work home to guarentee that Friday Fun.  Many students are finding their focus and attention to work completion improves when their efforts are directed toward a positive consequence that they can earn. EXCEPTION: Guided Reading assignments are nightly expectations so students can develop fluency and keep up with their reading group; reading expectations should be about 30 minutes per night.

 

It is not too late to make changes in your child's classroom support at school; please contact me with any ideas, suggestions, or concerns that we can work through together for perhaps a better learning experience for your student.

 

Thank you for any and all communications!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Hello Everyone!

 

A beautiful sunny week gave us lots of oppportunities for outdoor time.  We have begun our HOW WE EXPRESS OURSELVES  IB unit where we are exploring the connections between nature and ourselves.  We spent one afternoon just looking more closely at things (lots of magnifiers) that are so familiar we might not notice them anymore.  We discovered and discussed 'wonderings' about little bugs we found, dandelions, apple blossoms, and new pine tree growth. We talked about the consistancy of natural cycles - seasons, blooming, growth -that helps us feel comforted even in times of great change in our lives.  In the coming weeks, we will be exploring plant and animal adaptations, nature's effective designs, and how humans can learn from how nature functions. 

 

Students have signed up for another round of sharing;  T-F a selected student shares something with particular attention to the structure of their presentation:  introduction, some details, conclusion.  They have bcome quite adept at this;  although it is not required, many students plan and practice their presentations before their sharing date for a more professional presentation.  It is so impressive to see the growth and confidence these students have developed as public speakers.

 

We have begun end-of-year screenings. The kids have shown amazing growth in, independently and confidently, electronically accessing their test site and using their testing tools; this is a big change from our fall testing! Our testing continues this week and perhaps into the next.  I am trying to spread the testing out a bit so students have time to do their best and not feel stressed or overwhelmed with the process.

 

MATH:  more with fractions - sharing and grouping -with ants and food; ask your student about this fun group work! Daily rectangles are building rectangular arrays that go with each date of the month; we are learning concepts like 'area', labeling our answers, the addtion-multiplication connection, and introductions to prime and composite numbers.  We have also been looking at subtraction in yet another method: 'the trading of tens to ones'.  This is an important understanding that often results in errors when just learning/using the standard algorithm so we are really digging into the foundation of this process. We will continue to practice but much more is done with subtraction and ten trades in 3rd grade.  Our goal is to be really comfortable with decomposition and modeling (in numberlines and fact families and all addition and subtraction strategies) so the connection to 'ten trading' makes more sense in the future.

 

WORD WORK: We are on our last (WOW!) two week cycle of reading and spelling common vowel paired words.  This cycle is the /au/ and /aw/ sounds.  I hope you have seen your student's list of words; I have encouraged them to just look at the list nightly and practice spelling a few to get a feeling for the words.  Reviewing those trick words are important too as these are words that commonly show up in 2nd grade reading and that do not consistently follow a spelling pattern.  Knowing these words leads to more fluent reading.

 

In our Approaches to Learning (ALTs), we are focusing on taking responsibility for our own learning with more practice with goal setting and planning.  Your student brought home their Plan To Achieve Friday Fun for this coming week.  It is their own plan - I've only reminded them that there is no 'homework', just work to to choose to take home if they want to stay on track for F.F.  Time use and personal time management in class is essential for stress-free success: I try to plan class work to be work students can usually complete in the work time provided in class. Most days there is more than 45 minutes of choice free work time spread out over the day. (Using this time wisely is the key to work completion in class.) Your student's plan is their own... and there is a wide variety of plans in this class; we will talk about realistic planning this coming week and reflect on our goal and planning daily. The plan is coming home for your signature just so you can see your student's thinking process and perhaps talk with them about 'how the plan is coming along' each day this week.  As the leaders in your student's world, making connections to how you plan and set goals will help your student see the real world connections to this small but essential activity.

 

As we inch toward summer, typically students can feel the 'lessening of purpose' with school expectations. This can cause greater stresses with personal relationships, group work, time choices, and work completion. We will be spending more deliberate time with our mindfulness activities in the next few weeks and our Classroom Thoughts- To-Keep-In-Mind:  *Treat Others the Way You Want to be Treated  *The Three Gates of Speech (meaning if a statement does not meet these 3 gates, it should perhaps not be expressed): 1)Is it true?  2)Is it kind?  3)Is it useful?  *What If Everybody Did? 

 

THANK YOU to all that are communicating regularly and helping with getting our students successfully to the close of our year!

 

SPECIAL THANKS to Laura Siebecker for her generous donation of new, FRESH writing tools for our classroom.  There is nothing like new markers and colored pencils to inspire our imaginations!

Hello everyone!

Thank you for your appreciations this Teacher Appreciation Week;  it means a lot to me! Your students had thoughtful and kind words to all of their adult supporters in school and I know those words and thoughts mean as much to others as they do to me!

IB:  We have finished and organized our work history of HOW THE WORLD WORKS.  Once put together, your students marveled at what and how much they learned!  This will be coming home soon.  Please particularly note the last pages: the reflection and action.  These are key and essential parts to IB; students will be reflecting on Learner Profile, Approaches to Learning, and Action Steps for every unit in every grade...this year is just their first formal exposure to it. This reflection process is the beginning of recognizing who we are as learners, our own strengths, and our own needs. The inventions are fascinating, original, and thoughtful.  I hope you can encourage your student to explain theirs to you!

 

MATH:  More measuring this week with our centimeter 'ants'; extended learning with 'meter' and 'decimeter'.  Number corner is an interesting mix of an introduction to division in sharing, grouping, connection to multiplication, and array models. This is very new and challenging; it requires focused attention while we work on these ideas together in class. Your kids have done GREAT! There will be much more of in years to come; this is only the introducing of these concepts.  Students continue to work on their fluency with addition and subtraction and in assessing, underestanding, and modeling with word problems.  Their growth in independence here is astounding!

 

READING:  I hope your students have found much more time to read at home; it is the most important practice activity your child can do to see growth in every area and to increase confidence in their learning abilities. This year students have shown tremedous growth particularly in reading directions; they can do this mostly independently now and they know their strategies: reread and reread, underline key information, ask questions if support is needed in decoding or understanding a word!

 

WRITING:  We have finished this two-week spelling cycle and will start our final (WOW!) cycle this coming week.  We have worked on personal pronouns, reflexive pronouns, and subject/object/possessive pronouns.  We are well on our way to finishing our original narratives; all have moved from the planning process to the writing process and several are already editing, revising, and improving - using adjectives, adverbs, and more interesting verbs to enhance their expression. Completion may take another couple weeks. 

 

Please call or email with any thoughts you might have;  we can fix things that need fixing, together! You might have noticed changes in classroom procedures throughout this year as  adaptions from your suggestions were made - thank you for your communications! Changes in procedures are also due to your students' growth! They have earned a new level of independence and decision making in their days now; they are showing understanding of their personal connection to their own success and to  the success of our whole classroom community.  It makes all that we do that much more fun and exciting!

Hello everyone!

This is our last week of April -  this class has 6 weeks of 2nd grade remaining. It is a marvel to see how much growth has happened this year, particularly in reading, writing skills and stamina, and in their classroom participation and responsibility to learning. Even the children see it in themselves when they see their successes and remember how their skills were so different in Oct. 

MATH: We are immersed in learning about different ways to measure the same thing; earlier in the year we worked in customary increments, now we are involved in metric scale.  We have been practicing in centimeter and meter lengths, and learned how base ten supports the metric system. We have learned how to use a line graph  to see changes in our April school-day temperatures and compared Fahrenheit and Celsius measurements. We also have a used a bar graph to compare our physical weather differences.  Below we are working on using meter sticks for measuring.

New IXL charts have been distributed; IXL is not required but it REALLY can support foundational learning in our units.  Please check out MATH - level C, Modules P1, P7-16 for extended learning with measurements.

READING/WRITING - We continue with our leveled reading groups exploring the 5 W's (who what when where why) in fiction and nonfiction. Our writing is an original narrative using story arc preparation. Our grammar work was in reflexive pronouns; we will move on to possessive pronouns this week.

IB - HOW THE WORLD WORKS - We continue to explore the the amazing qualities of water, this week featuring the heating/cooling cycles in our world. We will finish the unit this coming week with exlorations of how we use water in our technologies that can improve our lives.  Ask your child about the Fog Catcher and the innovative guy who solved his Peruvian village's water problem with this clever invention!

Problem solving is a major theme in our classroom now.  How can I solve this problem I have with ________(fill in the blank: math, 'a person', my work habits, my attitude, my time use,  organization, etc.). After trying to solve any problem first on my own and realizing I may need help, I then can consider when/how can I get help and from who?

For some, learning to tie (esp. shoes) is an important problem to solve. I created a tying practice device (see below) where students can practice tying and solve this problem themselves.  Ask your child if they have been practicing.  

Friday Fun is a huge success in supporting students' independent decision making and learning to manage their own time in their busy days.  It also is a mechanism that introduces consequences (positive and negative) to choices made during the week. I hope you have noticed that there are now only suggestions for homework (reading remains a daily expectation); all work assigned can be completed in school if using time wisely (this week alone students had over 115 minutes of independent choice time for work completion). This week 2/3 of this class was ready for Friday Fun by lunch time and 1/3 was ready for Friday Fun by 7:45!  That's a lot of earned free time on Friday and students are thrilled with themselves when they earn F.F. with their choices. This week students set personal goals for themselves on how they can achieve F.F. in the coming week.  Some student suggestions were stay focused in the provided work time, pay attention to lessons so work is easier, take one page of work home per night, try to catch up on Wed. afternoons.  Those are some terrific suggestions!

Please let me know how things are going; changes can happen for your student's school experience if we work together on where you see challenges!  Studies have shown that good habits (habit being an internalized routine) can be created in just 6 weeks!

 

Hello 2nd Grade Families,

We've had a very busy week; the kids have loads of energy with spring break on their minds!  It has been wonderful being able to take frequent outdoor breaks in the beautiful spring sunshine. 

 

When leaving on Friday, I asked each student about their plans for break and ALL of them said they would be reading a lot! HOW exciting to hear! I shared with them this week that although the practicing required in learning to read might sometimes feel hard and tedious, it is THE most important thing they can learn to do well.  Like all things we do well, it takes practice to get to feeling successful.  But there will be a moment when you start reading something and your mom or dad will call you for dinner and you realize the whole afternoon has slipped away inside of your book.  THAT is when the joy of reading happens; it is probably a memory moment we all have from our past...the first book that took us to another place or time!  I wish that for all of my students and work toward that goal for them every day.  Practicing reading over spring break should be fun and easy and a source of pride for your child. There may not be much traveling this year again, but I hope they have lots of good reading material to take them away on spring break!

 

WORD WORK:  We have finished another cycle of reading and spelling words that have commonalities...in this case, words that have the ou/ow vowel teams; our new cycle will start after break. We began working with personal pronouns, and will continue, on our return, with possessive and reflexive pronouns.  We are starting to write original narratives;  we are taking it slow so all students can develop their stories using the story building tools we have been working with: story arc maps and those wonderful adverbs and adjectives that give sparkle to a story.  

 

MATH: Students have a warm up math exercise every morning that reviews fact and computational fluency in an assortment of ways.  Most students that arrive by 7:40 have plenty of time to finish that morning's assignment but if not, it can be completed anytime before Friday.  We  continue to work toward greater accuracy and confidence with money computations and large number addition and subtraction using decompostiion and number lines. Some of our activites this week involved connections between repeated addition with multiplication, and how multiplication shows up in our area array models.  We are also spending more time with understanding what a fraction of a whole or a set really means.  We are practicing graphing skills with a line graph for daily temperature (both Fahrenheit and Celsius), and a bar graph charting the weather. (We've nearly worn down our yellow crayons with all our sunny days!)

 

Our HOW THE WORLD WORKS unit is all about water now.  We've located important water sources on U.S. and world maps and compared that information to population centers.  We also looked at areas of current and future water stress and again made connections to population centers.  We concluded our week with drawing and discussing the water cycle and its value to our lives and our planet.  Ask your student about this! Maybe they would like to show you how we made 'rain' on Friday!

 

I hope these weekly reviews are helpful and useful toward a better understanding of what we are doing in class. Maybe this review provides some talking points if, when you ask your child, "So what did you do in school today?", they reply "Oh, nothing" or "I don't remember."  Please let me know if this review is helpful or what would make it more helpful.

 

Have a wonderful spring break!

Hello Families of Shoreham 2nd grade:

As many of you know from your student's conference, students are working on identifying successes this year and their goals for "growing" forward.  They seem committed to growth and very willing to make goals toward that end. One goal that came up over and over is READ MORE.  This is so so important; it is in fact, THE one absolute thing your student can do to grow in all content areas.  Read more, practice reading more. Just like basketball free throws or driving a vehicle (or anything that has skill involved...),  it is hard in the beginning, maybe even frustrating but with patience and perseverance, practice WILL makes one better. I hope in these final weeks of 2nd grade, we can all make a strong push to more reading - both at school and at home.

This last week (other than Wednesday afternoon), I sent home ZERO homework.  I am hoping this will free your child up for more reading at home.  Our work is done in class and students need to use their time wisely during the lessons and independent work times to complete the assignments. This means a committment to using their time wisely! Completed assignments for the entire week, are due on Friday. Those with completed assignments for the week, have LOTS of extra outdoor time on Friday and those with incomplete work have time to get those assignments done and get outside! 

 

Math:  Fractions using WHOLE and SETS; arrays and 'daisy' petals (last month it was snowmen!) to help us understand the repeated addtion in multiplication; metric system in measuring and some statistics (we are graphing this beatiful weather we are having!)

 

READING: (re: first paragraph) Our guided reading groups continue to focus on main idea with supporting details and writing in that way as well.

 

WRITING: we are preparing for our narrative writing with study in adjectives, adverbs, and pronouns.  Please Please remind your student (who brought his/her journal home to show you for conferences) to bring it back to school!  We need it for further writing projects.

 

IB:  How WE Organize Ourselves   We have moved from an introduction to matter to studying water and its uses, value, and properties.  Lots of fun activities with this unit...this week we created a Water Sources Booklet and explored the Shoreham School campus for evidence of water.  One student's comment:  'I've always seen this but I never really looked this closely before.'  We are learning that if we can take some time to pay attention and observe, even to familiar things, new and exciting things will be evident!

I hope this stretch of sunny beautiful weather was just what you needed to rejuvenate and appreciate...It was for me!

 

Happy April Everyone!

Many conferences happened this week; strudents involved did an outstanding job of presenting their learning and goals.  As a first time 'student led conference' they really performed well. It was an interesting process reviewing the CCSS(Common Core State Standards) in connection to this presentation, too.  Students came away with a good understanding of how much progress we have made this year and they reflected on their personal growth.  THANK YOU to parents for actively participating in this new activity and THANK YOU for your kind words of encouragement and support!  I am looking forward to the remaining student conferences this Thursday.  Ms Irene wanted to send her thanks to the 2nd grade families for being the FIRST class to fully respond to conference signup! KUDOS!

 

 

Daily read-alouds include stories from James Herriot (All Creatures Great And Small) and to welcome April...and baseball season... a reading of - and reflections on - Casey At The Bat. I hope you have enjoyed your student's wonderful creativity with Robin Hood!

 

We concluded several units this week:  assessments in Math unit 5 and Number Corner concepts #3. Most students took on the learning challenge of drawing 3D shapes and creating with them...VERY POPULAR! If you have not yet seen some of your student's creations, Ask them to show you!

 

We also finished our How We Organize Ourselves unit with the completion of the final essay on how a product is produced, distributed and traded. Students are in various stages of completion with this; we do need to move on and start our next unit so if your student has not completed their work to their own satisfaction with the expectations of the assignment, they may continue to work on it in their free time and submit it again when they are comfortable with their essay.  However, we will not be dedicating more time to this in class.

 

All three Guided Reading groups, in one way or another, and with leveled texts, are working on the structure and text clues to understanding  fiction and nonfiction writiing...with a little poetry thrown in! There are several 2nd grade CCSSs that relate to this so it is an important focus for all levels of reading.

  

As always, please contact me with even the smallest concern or question or suggestion; we can discuss things and together make what we think might be good changes 'for Team [your chlid]'! (And thank you to all who to do this!)

 

 

 

 

 

Out like a lamb, INDEED! 

 

We have enjoyed many opportunites for outdoor time this week.  A kindergardener stopped me in the hall recently and asked why we have so many "little recesses"? I told her these are not really recesses, but EARNED freetime: active participation in class and focus on work for 20-25 min. equals 2-8 minutes of free time - TMI for this little one, but 2nd graders understand! If I put effort into my work time, I get the full 8 min; less focus, less freetime (and I can use the time to take work action where I might have done it before). The mini-breaks really make a difference - almost ALWAYS all kids get at least two minutes for each break time for a quick run!  Fridays are cumulative:  all the week's work done = more time outside; otherwise, that outdoor time translates to catch-up time. This promotes good choices with time management all week...which leads me to ROBERT FROST.

 

The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost is an important poem on making sometimes hard but important choices that make a difference. We have read this poem many times, learned new vocabulary, translated sections to words we understand and summarized it. We have acted it out on the playground and talked about how this applies to our lives; we have talked about our choices with time, words, and actions. And now I have students noticing moments in their school day that connect to this poem! It has been surprisingly fun and productive.

 

WE FINALLY finished our paper chain of 1000 links and on a beautiful afternoon connected the 100 groups of ten to each other to see what 1000 looks like (predictions first of course...I was WAY off :->)  Then we thought about what 10,000 and 100,000 is and what those might look like.  Many thanks to Ms. Claire (Officer), Ms. Abby, and Ms. Ann for support!

We have finished our Epic research/response learning engagement connected to How We Organize Ourselves. This was about 4 weeks, 1-2 hours of independent class work time per week. We needed to have a completion date and the kids knew it was Friday; some have not completed the expectations and are welcome to continue with it and hand it in for a change of grade at anytime but there will be no more dedicated class time for work on this.

 

Ditto for ROBIN HOOD, our finished read-aloud from this past month. Students were given a week+ of warning that their summaries/pictures should be completed by Friday...taking art supplies home to finish work on the last two Wed. afternoons was recommended. Finishing them is a great IDEA if they are incomplete but our new read aloud starts MONDAY. These booklets are WONDERFUL examples of student art skills interpreting the Robin Hood chapter action! 

 

Ditto for GOOGLE SLIDES presentation on The Pros and Cons of Trade. You can see your student's work in their Google Slides. If it could use some work, your student can complete/enhance it for a grade change, but we will not be dedicating anymore class time with this activity.

 

TAP INTO READING our whole-school reading challenge has been completed!  2nd graders logged over 10,000 hours; please give your students HIGH KUDOS for the many minutes they read each day.  More importantly, they have come away with new reading goals: "I'm going to keep reading EVERY day."

 

I hope you have noticed the incredible changes in the spelling dictation results! Spelling thinking, editing and application to reading development is really improving! The kids REALLY love this dictation and challenging themselves to improve!

 

Along with spelling, learning parts of of a complete...and interesting... sentence (nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, articles) is our focus in work work now. We are having fun as a class adding adjectives and adverbs to a "boring" sentence and seeing how our visualization of the subject and action changes.  This will help support our next writing assignment: a fictional story of choice!

 

Math continues with addition and subtraction strategies, money value and computations, and understanding large number (hundreds to 1000) counting through pattern awareness. We are also finishing work with 3D shapes - ask your student about the parts of a 3D cube or prism and some of the new shape vocabulary they know!

 

In preparation for conferences beginning this cominng week, students are reviewing and noticing all the work they have done within the 2nd grade Common Core State Standards.  This document will be shared with you at conferences.  We only have a 20 minute conference block so I will be asking students to just share their specific growth and goals gleaned from this document but I hope you can take the time to review their thoughts on where they feel they are in their learning.  NOTE: the checked boxes are the ones THEY chose in reflecting on themselves, not boxes I chose.  If you have any questions about their choices or what we are doing, please contact me and we can continue our conference at a later date.  My intention is that this document is informative to families and energizing for students to see how much progress they have made this year.

 

THANK YOU for your prompt responses to conference signup!  I will see many of your this week!!