Happy Hanukkah!

We have had such a fun week! Our fabulous Judaica team planned Hanukkah assemblies for each afternoon. We lit the candles, sang songs, ate jelly donuts, made dreidels out of Legos, played games, and watched a Hanukkah movie! Even with all of this excitement, I’m so proud of our second graders for focusing on their lessons each morning!

      

Project Based Learning- Social Studies

This week, the students had to plan a Hanukkah party as part of our unit on being smart shoppers. Each group had a budget of $50 to buy food, games, and gifts. The students had to work together to decide how many guests to invite, if they wanted to provide dinner or simply latkas, and if they wanted their guests to play games and win prizes. All of the groups were able to plan fun parties that came in under budget (some groups had so much money to spare that they decided to go back to our class store to buy more jelly donuts and gelt!) This project was a fun way help the students start to think ahead about how they’ll spend their money and understand how much different things cost. Below, the students are creating posters to illustrate their parties. Each poster lists the items they bought with their $50 budget.

Reading

The students worked on identifying the main idea of a nonfiction text. They learned that the title of a piece often goes along with what that piece is all about.  The students have also been studying fiction texts, to see how writers add in dialogue using quotation marks. We will begin adding dialogue into our writing soon!

Spelling

The students studied words containing “ch” and “th” this week. There will be no spelling words next week.

Vocabulary

The students did a fabulous job on their midyear vocabulary test! This test assessed their knowledge of the words from our first six units. Our next set of words will be alarm, collect, damp, insect, plant, safe, scatter, soil, team, and tool. Many of these words are homophones and the students will study the multiple meanings. For example, soil meaning dirt, and soil meaning to stain something.

Writing

The students worked on writing, editing, and publishing their Winter Wonderland fiction stories! On Monday, we are going to share all of the stories and give each constructive feedback on how to make our writing even better. The students do an excellent job of listening to each others’ suggestions. 

Math

We have begun our unit on geometry! This week we discussed how we are surrounded by space and that space contains lots of things which all have shapes. In geometry we are concerned with these shapes, how to define them, and what they teach us about the world-from math to architecture to biology to astronomy (and everything in between). In this unit we’ll cover angles, intersecting and parallel lines, right triangles, perimeter, area, volume, circles, triangles, quadrilaterals, 3D shapes, and more! 

Hanukkah Sameach from my family to yours!