A Fabulous Week!

Wow! Today was an awesome, high energy, spirit day! We have many students very excited about the Super Bowl this weekend!
  

Looking back over this past week, I cannot believe how much we accomplished! The students took a phonics assessment with me, completed the Unit 2 assessment that goes with their Journey’s reading curriculum, and had a one-on-one writing portfolio conference! These assessments provided me with a lot of fabulous data that will help drive my instruction over the next month. Beginning this Monday, I will be administering the On the Mark reading assessment that will determine your child’s current reading level. Watch for information to come home in your child’s gold folder about reading levels during the next two weeks.

Writing
So much amazing work occurred this week in writing! The students completed their animal essays and edited them with their peers. I heard such awesome conversations as the students helped each other fix spelling, grammar, sentence structure and more! It is very exciting to hear second graders talk to each other about using more interesting verbs and adjectives! The students added conclusions onto their pieces to help wrap up their work and added on a table of contents.

Each student had a chance to show me their essay and we used this piece of writing to see if they had met their previous writing goal and to create a new goal. Our writing goals are as diverse as the students in this class! Here are some of the goals we are working towards in second grade:

– I will use 5 or more sensory words in my writing.
– I will write complete sentences that contain a noun and a verb (subject and predicate.)
– I will use punctuation to help my reader know how to change their voice as they read my work.
– I will write endings or conclusions to my work that match my strong beginning, and make my reader feel that the work is complete.

The students will work on these goals as we move through our new writing unit on creating voice.

Reading

Next week, the students will read the humorous fiction story, Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type. The students will work on drawing conclusions based on what they have read. They will also practice adding “s” or “ed” on to words, learn about types of sentences, and discover onomatopoeia in books they read (onomatopoeia are sounds like buzz, woosh, swish, and ring!) Our vocabulary words next week are: problem, impossible, understand, impatient, furious, demand, gathered, and believe.

Here are students sorting the vocabulary words from our second reading unit onto our noun, verb, and adjective word wall.

Spelling

This week we studied words that begin with the blends “bl” and “fr”. Next week we will study words that end in the letter “k” or “ck”.

Math

We became subtraction superstars this week! The students practiced strategies for subtracting numbers and for regrouping. When the students are required to regroup the ones and tens, we call it “making a trade.” We said there cannot be any “switcharoos” where the students try to reverse the top and bottom numbers just to make the problem easier. The students also began working on some beginning multiplication skills by looking at arrays. Arrays equally group numbers into columns and rows. We made arrays on our geoboards and drew them out on our marker boards as well. Next week we will continue practicing subtraction and making equal groups.