5-27-16

5-26-16

Fact fluency up to 20 in addition and subtraction are end of the year goals in 2nd grade.  You'll notice a lot of fluency worksheets in your child's Friday folder this week.  We did a variety of fact fluency worksheets so  I could  get a good idea of where the class is as a whole.  There are a handful of students who have both addition and subtraction mastered.  The majority of the students still need to keep working on facts up to 20 over the summer.  It's an easy standard to practice no matter where you might be this summer.  Subtraction facts are always harder for 2nd graders until they put it together that they can use addition to help with subtraction.  Please take a look at all the practice sheets we did this week so you know if your child needs to keep practicing this skill at home. 

Friday, June 3rd 6-8 p.m.

The book fair will be open for the kids to buy books on Friday, June 3rd during their recess and at the Ice Cream Social from 6-8 p.m.

We spent a large part of the week working on narratives or short stories.  In my opinion, this is by far the hardest of the 3 writings that we work on.  We did personal narratives in the beginning of the year, which everyone did a very good job.  Creating a short story from scratch is a little harder to organize and write down on paper.  Here are some things that all narratives must have:  characters, setting, problem(s), attempts to solve the problem, and finally a solution.  We worked on narratives about caterpillars this week.  I wanted this week to be a realistic fiction about caterpillars.  Next week, I will let their imaginations run wild so some of the stories should get pretty interesting.

We already finished up the lessons on 2-dimensional shapes and polygons.  We have about 5 lessons or so on fractions and then we will have met all the essential standards in 2nd grade.  Any days that we have left over will be spent on telling time.  Telling time is kind of a lost art with everything going digital these days but we will do our best to be able to tell time to the 5 minutes on an analog clock.

All of our caterpillars have been in their chrysalis all week.  We should have some butterflies when we return from Memorial Day Weekend.  Hopefully they won't all emerge while we are gone.

5-20-16

5-20-16

Please send in your May snacks if you haven't already.  Our cupboards are pretty bare.  You may want to start packing an extra snack for your child just in case we run out.

Turtle Trot Reward Picnic

The school-wide picnic will be on Thursday, June 2.  Each class will get to eat their lunch outside during their lunch time so everyone should pack a lunch on that day.  Anyone is welcome to join the 2nd grade group during their recess that day.  We have recess and lunch from 10:56-11:44.  I'm not sure exactly how it's going to work.  More details to come...  Rain Date will be on June 6th.

Lesson 1   

Objective:  Describe two‐dimensional shapes based on attributes.

Lesson 2 

Objective:  Build, identify, and analyze two‐dimensional shapes with specified attributes.

This was the final week for our What a Surprise! unit. We wrapped it up by thinking about this: “How is life now the same and different from life long ago?” We read an informational text about Benjamin Franklin, who made many helpful new discoveries long ago. In addition to Now & Ben, we will read A Model Citizen, where we learned of the many other helpful things Ben Franklin did for his country.

Target Vocabulary: accomplishments, inventions, result, designed, achieve, composed, remarkable, amounts 

Phonics Skills: Reading longer words; final stable syllable -le 

Vocabulary Strategy: Using a dictionary 

Comprehension Skill: Compare and contrast—tell how two things are alike or not 

Comprehension Strategy: Visualize— picture what is happening as you read

Today marks the 10th day since our caterpillars arrived.  We have focused on what plants they eat in the wild and learning about all of their body parts.  Each child needs to know that a caterpillar has a head, thorax, abdomen, spinneret, 13 body segments, 12 simple eyes, 10 prolegs, 6 true legs, spiracles, and bristles.