Newsletter 🦃

Hi Everyone! 

It is hard to believe that November is wrapping up. This month has flown by and we have some busy times ahead of us! I hope everyone had a fabulous Thanksgiving and mini break from school. It seemed like the perfect amount of time to recharge and get ready for the winter of learning ahead of us! Before we left for break, the students did a lot of thinking about what they were thankful for. We came up with some amazing things to be thankful for and our writing reflects that. This writing will be coming home to you this week! As we venture into December, we have a few events coming up that you will want to keep an eye out for- gingerbread house building with families and 2D's Got Talent! I will be posting these dates in a separate post with more information about each event later on this week! 

Reading

We celebrated all of our learning from our nonfiction unit with a fusion activity of informational writing, poetry, and art! The students worked so hard on their "Who Am I?" books and it was such a fun way to wrap up our unit. The students learned different painting techniques and created textured pictures with details that reflected their expert topic they had been studying. Each student also gave informational clues about their topic so the reader could guess what it was. We ended our celebration booklets with an acrostic poem, also written with facts we learned about while studying our expert topics! Mr. Fosher, Mrs. Belanger, and Mrs. Bates all joined us as we shared our work during our celebration reveal. Since our celebration we have worked a lot on our fluency as readers and have entered into our newest reading unit where we deeply study our characters. 

Writing

We are finishing up our own expert books and working a lot on our handwriting and good writing habits. Students are beginning to go back into their writing and double check for appropriate punctuation and capitalization of letters. We have focused on eliminating run on sentences and making them short and sweet. Short and sweet.... that reminds me a lot of these dragonflies. 🙃

Math

We continue to work on our subtraction strategies and now choosing the ones that work best for us when solving. Not everyone is going to want or need the same strategies. We have learned great ones but now the dragonflies are becoming more independent in the way they want to solve the problem! We are also working on rounding to the nearest ten and hundreds place. We have talked about how rounding is a strategy in it's self. Rounding can help you double check your answer quickly.

Social Studies

We had so much fun on our Strawberry Banke field trip! Students walked through the historic community and learned about Thanksgiving traditions and how they have changed through the decades. 

Our second grade rotating community day was a huge success! The students rotated the second grade classrooms and learned about different places in the community. First the students learned about the police station and it's role in the community. Since police officers work hard to keep us safe, we talked about the importance of knowing our addresses and phone numbers of our guardians in case of an emergency. The students filled out license cards with their information. The students did an activity with fingerprinting and looked at their own unique fingerprints. 

After the police station the students stopped by the SPCA room! The students filled out adoption papers and named the pretend pets they adopted! What fun!

Next, the students learned about the post office. They learned how to fill out addresses on the mail they were sending out and then delivered mail throughout  the school! Students also learned some tips about writing letters!

Lastly, students learned about the bank. Students learned how to fill out a check and deposit it! The highlight was getting a lollypop to bring home on their way out!

Science

We had a visit from Wildlife Encounters. We learned about how animals effect the earth we live on. We learned about their roles in spreading seeds and mixing up the seeds and dirt. It seems every animal has it's own role in nature and it was so fun learning their roles and  seeing some of these animals in real life!

School&Home Talk:

What was your favorite part of our Strawberry Banke field trip?

Which animal was your favorite to see/ learn about during our Wildlife Encounter visit? 

What is one hint you can give me from your "Who Am I?" book? 

What is one thing you would like about being a child in 1624? What is one thing you would dislike?

How is fluency in your reading the same as singing? (hint: Shawn Mendez activity)

What is one thing you can say to make yourself feel better, when you feel like giving up? 

What is one thing you are really good at that you might want to share at 2D's Got Talent?