Welcome Back!

We’ve had a wonderful (AND FREEZING) first week of 2018! 🙂

Reading & Vocabulary

The students have been hard at work reading about super storms and learning how to use dictionaries to find the meanings of their vocabulary words. The students worked on vocabulary projects for the following words: Bend, beware, damage, equal, flash, pounding, prevent, and reach. They have also been working on finding the differences between nouns, verbs, and adjectives and reviewing synonyms, or words that have the same meaning.

 

Writing

The students began their midyear writing assessment. This assessment will show me if they have mastered choosing strong ideas, writing with story structure (beginning, middle, end), and if they can begin sentences with a capital letter, end with punctuation, and spell the patterns we have studied. Our next writing unit will cover using strong writer’s voice to make stories and essays come alive for our readers!

Spelling

The students got their new words this week and they will be assessed on them next Friday. All of the words begin with the “fr” and “bl” blends, like in the words bloom and frigid.

Math

We are coming to the end of our geometry unit but the students will continue studying shapes and lines in the coming weeks! Symmetry and finding parallel lines are two of the concepts we will review next week. Our next unit will cover graphing, estimation, comparisons (for example what is the difference between 23 and 75?), subtraction with regrouping, and beginning multiplication and division strategies. Subtraction with regrouping is one of the more challenging math concepts that we study in second grade. The students will learn many strategies to solve these problems, including the tradition algorithm that their parents and teachers learned in school.

Project Based Learning- Science and Social Studies

This week we seized the cold weather opportunity and did several ice experiments. We learned that water changes from a liquid to a solid when it is 32 degrees or colder, but this process can take several hours or even all night! The students were surprised this morning when the water we’d left outside wasn’t frozen, and they were even more surprised that as the day “heated up” (from 11 degrees to 23 degrees) the water froze into solid cylinders! Next week, the students will start a new PBL project on natural resources. This will be a large project, lasting many weeks. Throughout this project, the students will also learn how to take notes, write reports, and to present to different audiences.