Newsletter 5-26-17

Hello Everyone! 

I hope your week is wrapping up just as lovely as ours has! We've had a great week and these hard workers definitely deserve a day off! There will be no school on Monday May 29 in honor of Memorial Day. I hope you have a safe and happy weekend with your family and friends! 

Thank you to everyone who joined us for our Author's Tea! I hope you enjoyed looking at your dragonfly's progress- they were so proud and it was definitely a special day to share with our families in the classroom. 

Reading

Our series book unit is in full swing and the students are learning to make connections and comparisons between books in series and most importantly be able to talk about their books with others! The students are reflecting on their reading and making predictions based on their deep analysis of their reading. The students have come so far in their discussions and it is amazing to hear them have conversations based on text in their groups. 

Writing

After our amazing celebration of our writing on Wednesday, we entered into a new unit! This unit focuses on persuasive writing. We kicked off the unit by creating our own commercials! The students are SO good at this. They were given the challenge to make us want to buy some pretty silly and random objects. We had a lot of fun watching each other's skits and noticing what made them powerful to the audience.We are now going to keep focusing and expanding on these ideas. We will be using these skills to make a difference. We will be writing with purpose and trying to persuade our audience to agree with us to make the world a better place!

Math

This week we have continued to focus on reading word problems carefully and determining what it is being asked. We notice when a problem is multi-step and what we need to do to solve it. We are also looking closely at the unit as we solve, whether the answer is in centimeters or the number of cupcakes needed at a party. We've also learned strategies that will help us estimate before we even solve! We've realized that estimating is very important now that we have learned the traditional way of adding and subtracting. Estimating before and double checking after we solve, have been a huge focus! We continue to work on measuring in units of inches and centimeters as well. 

Dragonfly News!

The second grade production of Can't Stop The Seedling is on Wednesday at 6:30. Please drop your child off in our classroom (Room 11) at 6:15! Each dragonfly should be wearing blue- unless your child is a "seed", seeds are to wear black. A blue shirt and blue jeans are preferred, but anything blue is fine! Our dress rehearsal will be performed to the school on Tuesday, wearing blue is not required for this! 

Our field trip to Great Bay Discovery Center is on Monday June 5th. We are in need of a few more chaperones. If you are interested please let me know! Permission slips were sent home in Friday folders and should be returned no later than Thursday June 1st. We will be leaving school at 8:45 and arriving back to school at 11:45, just in time for the Grandparent Luncheon. The second grade lunch time is 12:15 for this luncheon (this has changed from the original time) so please inform your visitors!