Happy Thanksgiving Everyone! I hope everyone had a great and safe Thanksgiving with family. This time of the year is so busy, especially in second grade! We have some exciting dates coming up, including a charity event- "2D Has Talent" and building gingerbread houses with families. Dates will be posted this week! Weekly words to study at home will also be coming home this week, after our short break!
Reading
We have been enjoying our nonfiction unit and are truly becoming experts on one particular topic. The students are ready to teach others about what they have learned. They have taken ownership through taking out their own books at the library, monitoring their thinking and questions, and recording interesting facts, opinions and questions they have.
Writing
We have been working on writing nonfiction. The students have shared what they are experts at from sports to even training dogs how to sit! They have written these "how-to" short books and we are now reading to write our expert books. We will be adding all of the features into our expert books that we see in the nonfiction books we read. The students have gathered their information and we are ready to begin on Monday.
Math
We wrapped up Unit 3 and the students blew me away this unit with their progress on explaining their thinking. We have been working on this since the start of the school year and the students have truly come so far. We have been practicing explaining our thinking to our classsmates, writing it on whiteboards, responding to word problems and ofcourse showing our work! This unit was especially tricky because it was our first glimpse at subtraction but the students have been using the strategy of the "friendly number 10" to help them. This stems back to knowing our math facts up to ten and then applying them to larger numbers. The students are getting really good at explaining their thinking when solving problems this way! This week we will be diving into the our fun new unit. We will focus on telling time and measurement!
Community Unit
Strawberry Banke was a great experience and opportunity for the students to see what Thanksgiving was like in the past. The students were so excited throughout the day, as they were seeing some of the history we had been talking about in our early community unit, focusing on Plimoth Plantation. The students loved to see what life would be like for kids back in 1600s all the way through the 1800s. They were able to string greenbeans for preservation, grind corn, measure with antique scales, make cornhusk dolls, make matza meatballs and put together charity baskets as they would be in the 1800s. This was a great day of learning for all! Thank you so much to the chaperones who made this day run smoothly! We will now be learning about the community of Stratham. If you or any of your family members are a community worker in Stratham- police, fire, postoffice, grocery.. etc please reach out to me, we would love to have you come in and teach us about what you do to help the community!
Dragonfly News
Wildlife Encounters came to our school on Monday to show us some of the important animals that help soil and plants. They talked to us about natural composting and how seeds get from one place to another in nature. The crowd favorite was the hedgehog!
