5 Fabulous Days

 

We had another wonderful week in second grade! A big thank you goes out to the parents who were able to attend Curriculum Night! If you were unable to attend, please check your child’s red folder for important information about sight words, reading responses, and more! Please let me know if you have any questions about the handouts.

Our first field trip will be next Thursday to the Recycling Center. This was a great trip last year! The students will have the chance to see a presentation about recycling and reusing materials and then take a tour of the facility. Our first Library trip is scheduled for November 20th. We will be visiting the South County Regional Library on Rea Rd. If you would like your child to have the opportunity to check out books, please send in their library card before the trip. You will also need to email me their 4 digit pin which is the last four numbers of the phone number that goes with your account.

Reading

This week the students studied how to compare and contrast elements in a story. They created Venn diagrams to practice this skill. The students also learned how to use a glossary to look up unusual words they found in their books. We learned that glossaries are different from dictionaries because they only contain words that go with the book you are reading. Next week, the students will read Henry and Mudge Under the Yellow Moon and we will learn about why authors write different genres of text. The students will practice writing questions and statements. Next week’s vocabulary words are: Woods, turned, tops, chipmunks, busy, picked, south, and grew. 

Here are some of the students hard at work practicing their glossary skills!

 

Writing

This week the students practiced writing complete sentences and identifying incomplete sentences. We will continue practicing this skill next week as we move further into our writing unit on creating strong story ideas.

Spelling

The students studied words that contain the short “o” and long “o” sounds this week. Next week, we will study words with the short “u” sound, like in the word just, and the long “u” sound, like in the word absolute. At this point the students know that the “bossy e” on the end of a word often makes the vowel says its name. This helps the students remember that long vowel words like cape, hope, and huge, end with a silent e.

Math

As we come to the end of unit 2, we are studying different subtraction strategies. The students can use any of these strategies to efficiently solve math problems. We have learned the “counting up” strategy- where you start at the lower number and count up to find the difference between the two numbers. For example, 11 – 6 = ___ Start at 6 and count up to 11! We have also learned the minus 9 and minus 8 strategies. When students see a subtraction problem that asks them to subtract 9 they can subtract 10 and add back 1. This is much easier for most students than trying to subtract 9. For example, 17 – 9 = ____ Think of 17 – 10 = 7 and then add back 1, so your answer is 8! The same concept can work when subtracting 8 but you will add back 2. For example, 13 – 8 = ____ Think of 13 – 10 = 3 then add back 2, so your answer is 5. All of these strategies are intended to help the students find their solutions more quickly. They also help when checking over their work!

Our next math unit will take us deeper into time, money, and place value.

The students had a great time practicing fact families and subtraction skills.

 

Have a wonderful weekend! Remember there is no school next Friday. 🙂