Week 8

We had a lot of fun in the sukkah this week! I hope everyone is having a wonderful Sukkot!                    

Reading

This week we started reading a chapter book called The Fantastic Secret of Owen Jester. This is a great read aloud book for second graders because it tackles themes like perseverance, handling difficult situations with peers, and problem solving! We used the book to discuss visualizing as we read. The students are learning to picture what they are reading in their heads, which will help them enjoy and better understand their books! Next week, we will learn how to identify the cause (what happened first) and the effect (what came as a result) of events in our stories. The students will read The Diary of a Spider and hunt for cause/effect relationships. The students will also learn two new types of sentences: Commands and exclamations (or sentences containing strong feelings.) 

Vocabulary

The student are learning that some words have more than one meaning. For example, we learned that cross can mean to go from one side to another, and it can mean someone is angry or upset. Next week, we will review the words from our first two units and work on synonyms and antonyms.

Spelling

Today, we took our test on long “o” and short “o” words. Next week, the students will study words containing the long and short “u” sounds. The long “u” sound,  like in the word rule, is much harder to hear than other long vowel sounds and the students will need to continue practicing how to read and spell words with this sound throughout the year. 

Writing

The writers completed their descriptive writing pieces about a mystery food this week. You can see their work in the hallway at Curriculum Night on Tuesday, October 17th. Next week, our writers will use the same amount of awesome details to write stories from their own lives! 

Math

We began studying subtraction strategies this week. The students learned that instead of subtracting they can count up from the smaller number to the bigger number. For example, for 16 – 9, they can count up from 9 to 16 and the difference will be 7. We also wrote subtraction stories. The students will continue studying subtraction throughout the year.

Here are some of our mathematicians showing off their subtraction stories:

 

Project Based Learning- Being a Good Citizen

Today, we completed our first social studies unit on being good citizens. The students designed projects that will help their communities. Next week, the students will begin studying different types of communities and how they work together. We will learn about rural, suburban, and urban communities. We will also learn about the fifty states and our territories, like Puerto Rico.