Welcome Back!

We had a wonderful first week back at CJDS! I was overwhelmed by all of my birthday cards, flowers, cupcakes, and well wishes today! It was so sweet of you all to think of me and I really liked the nice handwriting on those cards! 🙂 I feel very thankful to have such an awesome and caring class, and to work with such thoughtful families!

For the second half of second grade, I am working hard to encourage the class to try new things and make mistakes! This means trying a strategy they haven’t used before, reading a genre of book they’ve never tried, or even partnering with a student they don’t usually work with. We are working on building a community of risk takers!!

Reading
In reading this week the students read a nonfiction piece called, Storm Stories, that shared facts about tornadoes, lightning, and hail. We used this text and our read aloud chapter book, Charlotte’s Web, to practice finding the main idea and details in what we read. The students also read weather poems, studied verbs, and hunted for words ending with “s”, “ed”, and “ing.” We played a verb game where the students had the chance to act out action words. They had a great time getting to dance, sing, sleep, sob, boogie, etc! The students also wrote resolutions for the second half of the new year.

Next week, we will read the folktales, How the Chipmunk Got his Stripes and Why Rabbits Have Short Tails. With these texts we will learn how to understand characters and determine which traits to use to describe them. We will work on breaking words into syllables, learn how to add “ed” and “ing” to base words, and study verbs in the present tense. The students will write pieces that summarize text and give the reader information. Our vocabulary words next week are: curled, direction, healed, height, toward, tunnel, tease, and brag.

Writing
This week we came to the end of our writing unit on organization by studying how to write an ending to a story. The students learned that writing, “The End!” when you feel like stopping is not the second grade way of ending a story. We worked on ending a story with feelings, and trying to make our readers want to read more! The students also learned that stories usually contain a problem and the ending will come after you have solved the problem. Next week, we will work on creating and editing paragraphs, and begin our new unit on writing with voice.

The students are sharing endings they wrote with their partners.

Spelling
This week the students worked on words with the vowel pairs “ea”, “ai”, and “oa.” These words all make the long vowel sound of the first vowel in the pair. To help the students learn this phonics rule we used the phrased, “When two vowels go walking the first one does the talking!” (like in the words rain, throat, and each.) Next week, the students will work on words with the long “i” sound, like find and dime, and the long “u” sound like June and July.

Here the students are coming up with vowel pair words with their partners.

Math
As we continued Unit 5 on geometry, the students had many hands-on opportunities to build and work with shapes! The students sorted 3D shape attributes into a Venn Diagram, made a 3D shape museum, constructed pyramids, and created posters showing lines of symmetry using magazine picture cut outs. Next week the students will review 2D and 3D shapes, forming line segments, and the geometry vocabulary. Our next math unit covers whole number operations and number stories. This unit will continue our work with addition and subtraction and introduce students to using arrays (a beginning multiplication skill.)

Here we are finding the similarities and differences between cones and pyramids.