I hope you had a wonderful Thanksgiving and are gearing up for the holidays! It was a pleasure to meet with each of you last week at Parent Teacher Conferences. It's always nice to discuss the progress your child is making. I am proud of each and every student and amazed at the gains they have each made in such a short time. Progress reports will be available on the parent portal on December 15th at 4:00 pm.
In terms of academics and what has been happening in the classroom over the past couple of weeks, we have been busy as usual. We have begun Unit 4 for math which focuses on place value and measurement. The first few lessons were on telling time. This tends to be a difficult concept for many second grade students. The standard for second grade is that the children are able to read to the nearest 5 minute interval. The more you can support us at home with this concept the better. I know many homes have digital clocks, but anytime you are out and about or if you have an analog clock at home, it's helpful to practice reading the clock as much as possible. We also discussed the difference between am and pm and students identified activities that they participate in during each part of the day.
As part of our work with Personal Narrative writing, this week we discussed the need to starting your sentences in different ways and varying your sentence lengths in order to make your writing sound more interesting. The students enjoyed editing a pre-written paragraph to practice this important skill. We will be doing some more skill practice next week. Hopefully we will see some carry-over to their next personal narrative story.
During our Guided Reading blocks, we have spent time reading non-fiction. The children are really invested in this genre and have enjoyed reading to learn! We reviewed nonfiction text features and the children looked for these features as they were reading books at their individual levels during reading groups. The features we have discussed are: headings, table of contents, diagrams, labels, photographs, captions, index and glossary. We will continue with nonfiction next week as well.
In science we ended our Plant and Animal Survival unit by doing a library research project. The children had the opportunity to research one of the habitats that we discussed during our unit and then share what they learned with a small group. The students also took their assessment and we have begun our next science unit which is called "Materials and their Uses." In the first lesson the children learned about the various materials that objects are made of - wood, glass, plastic, etc... We also talked about properties of these materials. Some of the properties we discovered were: hard, soft, smooth, sticky, thick, bends, clear, long, etc... Finally, the children sorted some objects depending upon the properties that the object had.
We had a wonderful time at the Turkey Trot! It was a beautiful day and so nice to see all of the children excited and getting some good exercise! Thank you to all of the families who made donations to Robinson! We appreciate your support!
Upcoming Dates
December 1st- Grades Close for Term 1
December 5th- School Store for Grade 2
December 7th- Early Release for Professional Development
December 15th- Progress Reports available on Parent Portal
No comments:
Post a Comment