September 25, 2020

Reading

Wow! These second graders are flying through picture and chapter books! They are visualizing as they read and asking great questions. This week, the students worked on identifying the main idea of a piece of text. The students have learned that the main idea is the most important idea in a story or article. To practice this skill, the students are working on summarizing what they read in one or two sentences!

Spelling

This week the students studied words containing the long and short “o’ sounds, like in the words joke and drop. Next week, the students will learn to spell words containing the long and short “u” sounds, like in the words absolute and shut.

Writing

The students began their first week of Daily Language Instruction or D.L.I. Throughout the year, D.L.I. lessons will focus on tips and tricks writers use to make their work easy to read and understand. These lessons will cover grammar, writing conventions, and even some spelling skills. This week’s lessons reviewed beginning each sentence with a capital letter and ending with punctuation.

Math

The students worked on place value, reviewed counting coins and dollars, and continued working on telling time to the minute. Reading clocks is a skill they can practice outside of school all year long! This week, a big focus was on finding equivalent numbers. For example, the students discussed how each of the following are equivalent to 10:

5 + 5

12 – 2

20 – 10

9 + 1

100 – 90

A dime

Two nickels

Ten pennies

X (Roman numerals)

The students have also begun working on making both sides of an equation equivalent, like in the following problems:

4 + 6 = ____ + 4

_____ = 15 + 20

7 + 5 = ____ + 4

We will continue to work on these skills next week and begin solving and writing addition word problems (which we call number stories.)