Week Eleven

This week in second grade, five brave candidates ran for student council. These girls brainstormed ways to make CJDS a better place, spent their free time writing speeches, and stood up in front of the class to present their ideas! I am very proud of our candidates’ hard work and peaceful campaigning. The class did a great job respectfully casting their votes in this primary election. We will vote for our class representative, and school president and vice president on election day, November 8th!

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Reading

We are working hard to use the context clues in the books to figure out the meaning of unknown words! This week, the students hit many challenging words in the nonfiction text, Animals Building Homes. The students used this text to draw a step by step guide of how a beaver builds its lodge. They had to use their visualizing and text reference skills for this task! Next week, the students will use these skills on their Unit 1 Journeys test. This assessment has the students read “cold passages” (text they haven’t read before) and answer comprehension questions using the skills we have studied so far this year, like sequencing story events and comparing and contrasting characters. 

Here are the second graders waiting to get their pictures taken on picture day! This class loves to read! 🙂

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Spelling

The students are currently studying words containing the short “a” and short “i” sounds. Next Thursday, the students will be assessed on these words.

Writing

We brainstormed story ideas this week from our lives and created a plan for writing a story. Each student’s plan shows what they are going to write about in the beginning, middle, and end. The students are starting their stories by writing a “Gotcha Grabber!” or interesting lead that will get their readers’ attention. Then they are using their writing plan and including as much detail as they can to draft their story! We will continue working on these stories next week and the students will get the opportunity to read them to their peers. 

Math

The students worked on adding coins, making change when shopping, and telling time this week. We will continue working on these skills and studying place value throughout the rest of Unit 3. One of the challenging skills in this unit is making change without going over the amount spent. For example, if you buy an apple for 0.35 cents and pay with a dollar, a common mistake that students will make is to say that they should get 0.75 cents in change because they are forgetting the the 5 ones in each number will form another ten. This is a great skill to practice at home by making sure that when you add the price and change together it doesn’t go over 100 cents. For example: 35 + 75 = 110 (oops!) 35 + 65 = 100! For now, the students can practice this skill without worrying about the decimal point.