Hello Everyone!
Get ready for a picture OVERLOAD! We have had our absolute best few weeks of learning. We have started new units, stepped up our kindness, and are taking true ownership of our learning. Please remember to send your child to school with a small pumpkin by October 31st for a craft activity! There is an early release day on November 1st due to Family/Teacher conferences! Teachers have an in-service day November 6th. Veterans Day is being observed on Monday, November 12th and picture retakes are on November 15th! It has been so great meeting with you and discussing your child's growth in second grade so far at the first few conferences! I can't wait to meet with everyone and share all of the amazing things going on in our classroom.
Math
In math we have already flown through our first two units. After spending a considerable amount of time on place value the students completed their performance task ahead of schedule and have totally proven that they are ready to move forward with some other math concepts! We will use our skills in place value to help us tackle more strategies for adding and subtracting with larger numbers. This next unit is a heavy one. It is where we learn the traditional way to add and subtract and some other concrete strategies that really teach us what we are doing with the numbers. Although we are working with bigger numbers now, it is still so important that students are working on their math fact fluency. If students can add and subtract numbers in their head up to 20 fluently than they will be able to use these new strategies with fluency as well!
Reading
You will get to see fun pictures from our Unit 1 reading celebration below. We are still using our reading strategies that help us to decode from unit 1 but we have made our way into unit 2. We are now working with nonfiction books. This has been so refreshing and the students are loving getting to know the new features that nonfiction books have. We are going to look at various topics through nonfiction reading but the most exciting part of this unit is that the students will become an expert of a topic they choose. It's been so much fun building reading habits like note taking and recording new wonders as we read nonfiction. In addition to our focus lesson each day students are now receiving a "high five and goal" to work on their independent reading when they confer with me! The fun is just beginning!
Writing
All I can say is WOW as we wrap up our first unit in writing. The students have taken every writing lesson to the paper and are whipping out some amazing realistic fiction stories. We used authors as mentors and peer edited these pieces. The students are so proud of their work and love to share their writing with the peers. We continue to work on handwriting and spacing as we write and there have been huge improvements in our writing actually looks! The craft of our writing is where we have really struck gold though. The students are truly writing as authors and it's amazing to watch them take ownership over the stories they are creating.
Science
We are looking at how earth materials are changed over time. We have looked at our garden and we have observed in our woods. While exploring with our stem buddies we saw that there are so many opportunities for us to learn in the woods. We came up with some ideas of how classes could work more in the woods and we are going to further explore this and pitch some ideas for stem buddy project.
Social Studies
We are entering a community unit where we will be looking at communities from the past and our own community around us. We will talk about what a community needed to stay successful in the past and what our community has for us! This is a fun unit!
Harvest Day
We were able to rotate through all of the second grade classrooms on Friday for our Second Grade Harvest Day! In each room there were fall activities that kept the day exciting! Thank you so much for making our classroom celebration so fun in the afternoon! We made our leaf animals and completed a math task and it was so fun to have you join us! Thanks for providing snacks for the kids to enjoy!
