November 8, 2019

Happy November!  I am amazed that today 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 recorded themselves sharing about their dioramas.  I shared them with you via email.  Please let me know if you did not receive an email with your child's video.

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. Please watch for information to be coming home from the school office. 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 11th- No School for Veteran's Day

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