Week 27

Check out our scientists in action! This week, the second grade visited Discovery Place to take a deeper look into the concepts of force and motion that they are studying in their Project Based Learning class! The students did hands on experiments with pushes and pulls, gravity, balance, velocity, and more! Their motion unit will continue in the P.B.L. classroom. Thanks for planning an awesome trip for us Mrs. Gamlin!

                                                                      

Reading

The students continued studying the author’s purpose for writing this week. We also worked on reading biographies and determining the most important information in nonfiction texts. We looked at dictionaries and learned about guide words and entry words. 

Spelling

The students studied words with silent letter patterns this week, like in the words night and yellow. Next week, the students will study the silent letter patterns “ai” and “ea”, like in the words sailboat and leap. 

Writing

We began working on a new genre of writing this week- persuasive writing! We are writing letters and paragraphs that begin with a topic sentence and include at least three reasons that support our persuasive topics. Watch out, you may have a very persuasive child on your hands soon! 🙂

The students also began meeting with me for writing conferences this week, where we looked at their last story draft and edited it to meet our second grade conventions expectations. The students will edit their work to make sure they begin sentences with capital letters, end with punctuation, and correctly spell words they should know. We will also look to see if they place commas in between words when making a list and capitalize all proper nouns.

Math

We have moved into Unit 8 on fractions! This unit will cover naming fractions, dividing shapes into equal parts, dividing groups into equal shares, equivalent fractions, and comparing fractions. Some examples of work in this unit include: Being able to say that 1/2 = 2/4, knowing that 1/2 is bigger than 1/3, and determining  1/3 of 12. This is a very hands on math unit with many opportunities for the students to find fractions in the world around them!