🌷Hello Families!🌷
I hope everyone had a great break and is ready for the last stretch of our school year! I can't believe I am already saying that! The weeks between February vacation and April vacation were our most dense weeks of learning. We covered so much and the students have noticably become deeper thinkers and problem solvers. The growth that is being seen continues to make me smile from ear to ear each day. Thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedules to meet with me during conferences. I love talking about these amazing kids and giving you a glimpse into our academic life here at SMS. I know this last stretch of the school year will be filled with so much laughter, joy, and extended thinking as we enter our final units and make our big move onto third grade! Here is a look into our latest adventures as a classoom family!
Math
Students have exited their unit of telling time and are able to explain their thinking when using analog clocks. We can tell time to to the hour, half hour, quart past, quarter til, five minute & minute! Many of that is beyond what is expected in second grade but the students were loving their success so much that we kept on trucking! We then worked with elapsed time and word problems that had to do with time. Students are now in a geometry unit where they are learning what makes shapes unique and how to identify them by their attributes. We have partitioned shapes by dividing them into equal parts to help move us toward the concept of fractions. The students are doing amazing with this and will continue to explore this idea!
Reading
We wrapped up our fairytale unit and students loved exploring the different types of historical writing. We looked at fairytales, folktales, and fables. Students loved folktales and identifying the lessons that were taught in them. One of our favorite's was The Fisherman's Wife if you'd like to check it out and have your dragonfly talk to you about what a folktale is! We are now in a fresh new unit and I have to say I think this unit has taken the cake for the most loved reading unit EVER. We have entered into a study of series book clubs. Students are responsible to read a chapter and then come to their book club accountable and ready to talk and share. We have talked about what makes a good book club member and how to have a successful conversation within a meeting. Students are taking notes about their thinking and about important events to monitor comprehension. Once we complete our jobs for our book clubs during reader's workshop then we are able to continue reading our just right books and focusing on our independent reading goals fro the remainder of the time.
Writing
Students have been working on many forms of writing! Although they are still writing with pleasure, they have transitioned from writing just for themselves to writing for an audience. They have shown so much growth as they try out these different types of writing. We have written persuasively, with opinion, lab reports, how to writing, writing about our reading, and now we are entering a poetry unit. The dragonflies have experimented with object poems and movement poems. We have talked about looking at the world through a poet’s eye and making the simple things beautiful. We have also started talking about line breaks and how poems are written much differently than any other type of writing they have done before! You will be getting an invitation to our Author’s Tea in Friday folders this Friday. This will be an event where your dragonfly will walk through their process as an author with you and read all of their final drafts to you in person! I will make a separate post about this event this week!
Science
We had our egg drop with our STEM buddies and it was SO fun! We had way more eggs survive the fall than we could have ever expected and the students were so proud. Not only did these eggs have to survive from the height of our school building but the students had to justify why they made their engineering decisions- this was a big project! The students loved watching Mr. G and Mr. Harrington throw their egg creations off of the roof and they were os excited to see if their egg survived. You should ask your dragonfly if their egg survived and if it didn't, I'm sure they already have a plan to redraft their creation!
With warmer weather approaching we are going to be leaving our states of matter unit and entering into a plant unit. This unit gets us looking at what plants need to survive and what they do for the earth. We will be having a second grade play all about plants and our class will be performing as the “water” role! Students will be assigned their speaking role if they wish to have one, tomorrow! The whole class will sing a class song together! Information and details about the play will come home this week as well!
