Week 33

Our writers have been hard at work brainstorming, planning, and drafting a story about something they did during their year in second grade! We are focusing on using proper capitalization and punctuation, as well as starting sentences in a variety of ways! The students are very excited to share their favorite piece of writing from this school year with you next Friday at our Writing Celebration!

Reading

As we move towards the end of our school year, it is important that your child continues to read at home each day. Next week, we will begin studying strategies that will help the students show off their awesome reading skills on the CTP4 test that we will take the second week of May. Some of the skills we will work on are:

1. Identifying “right there” questions that require the reader to look back to one spot in the text for their answer

2. Identifying “think and search” questions that require the reader to use multiple pieces of information from the text to answer a question (for example, information from the first paragraph and the third paragraph in a story)

3. Identifying “in my head” questions where the author does not directly state the answer to the question and the reader is required to make inferences, find context clues, and use back ground information!

Spelling

Next week we will study words that contain preconsonant nasals, which means there is an “n” in the word that is hard to hear! Examples of this are: Long, skunk, and find. 

Vocabulary

Our vocabulary words will be: Dive, enemy, frighten, herd, pack, prove, seal, smooth, soar, and steady. 

Math

We have completed our math unit on measurement but you can continue to have your child hunt for measurements all around them! They can look at the ounces and milligrams on their water bottles, and the grams on their snacks. They can think about different distances in centimeters, inches, feet, and miles. For example, “Which unit would be the most useful if we wanted to measure our yard? Square centimeters, inches, or feet?” The students did an excellent job studying perimeter and area and we will continue to review these skills in the next few weeks. Our new math unit will review adding dollars and coins. We will work on making change for purchases. The students will solve problems like, you buy an item for $1.49 and pay with a $2.00, how much money will you get back? We will also learn how to estimate the cost of purchases, for example: If you buy items that cost $1.60, $1.85, and $0.75, about how much will you spend? We have a lot of fun in this unit shopping at our school store again! 🙂