Shabbat Shalom!

Reading and Vocabulary

We began a new read-aloud chapter book this week, The Year of Billy Miller. In this story, Billy faces all of the normal highs and lows of a regular second-grade student and I expect to have some awesome discussions about the way he handles each challenge. Next week, the students are going to read various pieces of text and learn about the author’s purpose for writing (to entertain, inform, show how-to, persuade, etc.)

The students will begin our vocabulary curriculum next week. Our first set of words are branch, brave, dash, evening, greedy, pass, present, stream, trail, and wise. The students will have the opportunity to study the multiple meanings of words like dash (to move quickly or to add a small amount, like a dash of salt.)

Spelling

This week the students studied words where “y” acted like a vowel, like in the words shy, goodbye, and study. With the holidays and short weeks, many of the students didn’t get a chance to master this skill, so we will continue to study the same pattern next week with new words. We will have a spelling test on Thursday, 10/31 because there is no school on Friday, November 1st.

Writing

Our focus this week was on capitalizing all names and the pronoun I. Next week, the students will review nouns (a person, place, or thing) and learn that only proper nouns need to be capitalized. The students have been publishing their writing by fixing mistakes with capitalization, spelling, and end punctuation, and then copying their work in their neatest handwriting. Now that the students know how to pick strong ideas for their stories, it is time to focus on writing stories that contain a beginning, middle, and end.

Math

Last week, the students were introduced to Prodigy, an engaging math program that aligns with our curriculum. If you’d like, your child can practice their math skills at home by logging into Prodigy on a computer, Ipad, or smartphone. The students’ usernames and passwords are on the inside cover of their planner.

The students have been working on subtracting and writing subtraction number stories. Some of the subtraction strategies they have learned are “counting up” and the “-9 strategy.” The counting up strategy uses the students’ understanding of addition to aid them in subtraction. Instead of writing out 8 – 5 the students can count up from 5 to 8. The -9 strategy has the students use 10 and then add 1. For example, in a problem like 34 – 9, instead of lining the number up on top of each other the students can solve 34 – 10 = 24 and then add 1, to get 25 as their answer.

Social Studies

We have completed our communities! I have been so impressed by the students’ teamwork during this task! Our next social studies unit will follow the way that the community of Charlotte has changed over time. The students will learn that our city began as the intersection of two Native American trading routes and evolved into the second-largest banking city in the U.S.