A Week of Hanukkah Fun!

Wow! We have had such a wonderful week celebrating the miracle of Hanukkah. Ms. Chaya and the Judaica teachers planned fabulous assemblies where we sang Hanukkah songs, participated in relay races, made Channukiah, and ate gelt and jelly donuts!

A visit from the Student Council Dreidels!

Reading

This week the students began their mid-year assessments. I am assessing the students on their phonemic awareness (the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate individual sounds in spoken words), phonics, fluency, and comprehension. I will continue these assessments next week, and the students will come home with new reading levels. We will also study text features next week, like headings, bold words, glossaries, indexes, tables of contents, graphs, charts, diagrams and more! The students will have the chance to search through nonfiction texts to find and use these text features.

Writing

This week the students wrote a story about one day or night of Hanukkah. They were required to write a “grabber” to start their stories. A “grabber” is a few sentences that grab the readers’ attention and make them want to read your work. They were also required to write a beginning, middle, and end and use the grammar conventions we have studied this year. Today, all of the students shared their stories with the class. We celebrated the students’ writing and offered them “glows” (compliments) and “grows” (ideas for what they can do better next time they write.)

Here are our writers sharing their Hanukkah stories!

Spelling

This week we studied words that contain the long “i” or long “u” sounds, like in the words uniform and frighten. Next week we will review how to spell words containing long vowels sounds.

Math

This week the students took their mid-year math assessment, so we could see how they are progressing with all of the skills they need to know by the end of second grade. We also worked on estimation and adding using the partial sums algorithm. The partial sums algorithm has the students take apart double digit numbers into tens and ones. For example: 27 + 39 = ________. To use this strategy the students would add 20 + 30 = 50. Then 7 + 9 = 16. Then they would add the partial sums together 50 + 16 = 66. We also worked on measuring using inches and centimeters. The students learned that their measurements will not be accurate if they don’t line up their rulers or tape measures with zero!

Here are some of our mathematicians measuring the classroom!