Happy February! (Hurry Up Spring!)
Reading and Vocabulary
Wow! The class has really grown as readers! I have completed another round of reading assessments that require each student to read to me one-on-one. I am excited to say that the students have shown improvement in their phonics and fluency skills, mastery of sight words, and overall comprehension of text. In order to be ready for third grade, the students should continue reading at home each day. Some great questions to ask your child are:
- What is the main character trying to do? Or What is the main topic of your book?
- What do you predict will happen next?
- Are you feeling empathy for any of the characters? Why or why not?
- What caused the problems in this story?
- Why do you think the author wrote this book?
Our next vocabulary words are: Alarm, collect, damp, insect, plant, safe, scatter, soil, team, and tool.
Our upcoming reading strategies are: Determining facts and opinions and asking questions while we read.
Spelling
It’s plurals time! The students have learned to add “s” to the end of most words to make the word mean more than one. For the past two weeks, we have practiced adding “es” to words that end in ch, sh, s, x, and z. In class, we talked about how you can’t hear the “s” on the ends of words that end in those letters, so you have to add “es” (for example I can’t hear the difference between box and boxs, so the word has to become boxes.)
Next week, the students will study when to change a “y” to “ies”, like in the word city- cities, and when to change a word to make it mean more than one, like mouse- mice.
Writing and Science
The students are researching the life cycles of plants, insects, and animals and writing informational essays. This week, the students learned how to read an article and hunt for facts! Next week, they will determine the key vocabulary terms that must appear in their essay (like chrysalis and metamorphosis in an essay on butterflies) and begin drafting their introduction and content paragraphs.
Math
The class rocked their unit 6 pretest, showing me that they already know a lot of the content in the unit! Our biggest focus with unit 6 will be subtraction with regrouping. This is a difficult concept for second graders to master and each year I see frustration around this topic. Subtraction with regrouping means that the tens and the ones in the numbers need to be “regrouped” so that you can take the smaller number out of the bigger number. For example, 30 – 19, if you line the numbers up, how can you take 9 out of 0?! The students will study many strategies to make this skill less frustrating, like drawing out pictures and working with number blocks. The students will have many opportunities to practice with their peers and me!
Project Based Learning- Social Studies and Science
Today, we completed our 30 days of art with Mrs. Lerner. This has been an awesome experience and the students have created some beautiful pieces! On Monday, the students will begin their project based learning unit on natural resources. The question for this unit is: How can we, as reporters, research, write, present, film and publish a news show to teach our community about natural resources? The students will begin this unit by discussing what they know about natural resources and what they want to know!
