A lovely, amazingly, beautifully awesome week!

Reading

This week we studied the suffix “ly” and how it changes adjectives and verbs to mean “in a way or manner of something.” The students showed me how to move about the room quickly, angrily, hungrily, and happily! We also studied how to capitalize proper nouns like names, months, days, holidays, street names, cities, states, countries, and abbreviations. The students focused on finding the main idea and supporting details of what they read (see if they can sing you our song!) We continued our sentence editing by practicing where to place commas when they are in a list and when using them with quotation marks.

Next week, the students will read one of my favorite stories, Officer Buckle and Gloria. I love this book because it is all about making good choices! The students will also read the play, Safety at Home and practice emphasizing words to enhance the meaning of what they read. With these two texts the students will revisit the reading strategy of cause and effect. We will also work on breaking words apart using the different syllable rules, study abbreviations, and continue working on our dictionary skills. Our vocabulary words for next week are: Attention, buddy, obeys, speech, enormous, safety, shocked, and station.

Spelling

This week the students continued studying how to change singular words into their plural form by dropping the y and adding “ies.” The students all studied some irregular plural nouns like men, oxen, children, fish, moose, and feet! We are still on the hunt for irregular plurals to add to our list. Next week the students will focus on words that begin with “wr” and “kn” like wrap and knot.

Writing

This week the students continued working on writing persuasively and using their voice to get their message across. The students got to pick one topic they love and filled up a paragraph with “voice” so that their reader could tell how they felt about that topic. I read heart felt paragraphs about Mine Craft, ice cream, little brothers, and pizza lunches. The students also wrote persuasive paragraphs about a problem they saw in their community. They got to decide how big a community they wanted to write about, so some students wrote about problems plaguing their classrooms and others wrote about bigger problems that are hurting the whole country. The students wrote to persuade their readers not to litter, smoke, drive dangerously, and more! Next week the students will write persuasive essays that contain an introduction that grabs the readers’ attention and states a goal, 3 reasons that support the argument, and a conclusion that restates the goal.

Math

Fractions were the big focus of math this week! We used the shapes we had already studied in our geometry unit to help create a foundation for our thinking. As you can see on our chart below, we studied that a trapezoid is half of a hexagon, a rhombus is 1/3 of a hexagon, and a triangle is 1/6.

We experimented with the pattern block shapes to help us understand the part-whole relationship between the different fractions. We practiced shading in shapes to make different fractions. The students have learned that the denominator (bottom of a fraction) is the total number of original pieces and the numerator (top number) are the pieces that are represented. We also reviewed using arrays to find the product of multiplication problems and determining probability. Next week, we will work on finding fractions in a collection of things, determining equivalent fractions, and comparing fractions. You can begin this work at home by getting your child to think about things like whether they’d want to share a cookie with one friend or four!

    

We voted on a name for our new class fish! Welcome to 2nd grade, Squidy!