Newsletter 1/13/17

I can't believe another week has come and gone! We got through so much this week and had a lot of fun doing it. With Martin Luther King Jr. Day this Monday, we took time to really focus on equality and peace. The students had so many kind thoughts and ideas about these topics so we got them down in writing. The students loved learning about Ruby Bridges and we even talked about her like we do our reading characters- identifying her character traits and how we can exhibit them in our day to day life. 

Reading

This week was  all about putting what we have learned about our characters to work. We used what we know to predict what we think the character will do next. We worked on stopping ourselves in our reading (which is very hard) when we see our character facing a problem. We then predicted how our character would handle the problem on sticky notes and then read on to find out if we were right! The students loved this work because they wanted to be right every time. We had teachers visit from another school to observe our Reader's Workshop and they were full of compliments for the students. They couldn't believe this was only 2nd grade! The students love to show off their focus and reading stamina to visitors!

Writing

This week we took time to write what "peace" means to us. This writing was beautiful and I got to see the students' loving personalities shine through. Each dragonfly has such a deep understanding of kindness and the sense of community. The writing and beautiful water color craft look beautiful hanging in our hallway. We also came up with our setting, main character traits and problem for our newest fictional stories. 

Math

This week finished our Mid-Year Assessment and the students displayed all that they have learned this year in second grade. I am always blown away by their focus and hard work during math time. We continued to work on coin recognition and combinations this week. We also kept tackling coin puzzles and then moved into problems that involved making change from a dollar or more. The students went "shopping" and had to give change to each other and also played a vending machine game where they could pay in exact change when "exact change light" was on and only with dollars when the "exact change light" was off. The students have worked so hard at this and we are making great progress! This concept is very tricky, as it entails counting in tens, fives, ones and then also subtracting or counting up all in the same problem! Please take time to review coins and giving back change with your child. The more the students practice this, the more confident in the skill they will become!

Science

We continue to investigate the states of matter. This week we talked about how atoms make up all matter. We talked about how atoms are too tiny to see but they make up everything around us each day. To visually represent this we used cheerios to to show how atoms work in the different stages of matter. The students showed that the atoms are close together in solids, spread apart in liquids, and few and spread out for gasses. We also did a sorting activity to demonstrate that we know the difference between solids, liquids and gasses that are around us. The students are ready to experiment and understand states of matter even more! 

Life Skills

Mrs. Griffith will be coming into our classroom on Thursdays to talk about social skills and join us in our work with growth mindset. We will talk about social situations at school and feelings that we all have when we are faced with them. This week we did a "magic mirror" activity where we wrote down things we love about our self and what we are good at.

Don't Forget!
There is no school on Monday January, 16th because of Martin Luther King Jr. Day! Enjoy your three day weekend!