Weekly News 11-6-20

 Weekly News 11-6-20

Important Dates & Events:  

11/12 Veteran’s Day - no distance learning expected

11/23 & 11/24 - ½ Days for Parent/Teacher Conferences

11/25 - 11/27 - Thanksgiving Break

Our Work this Week:

*Lexia- Most students have a goal of 60 minutes a week in order to make reading gains.  When your child first logs into the program they will see how many minutes they have done and how many they have left.  If you ever need an update on this (how many minutes they have remaining to meet their goal) just send me an email and I can get that information to you!  

*In spelling we completed our work on short e words and did the spelling test.  Spelling cycles are taking more than one school week due to less in-person time. Everyone made gains with this more challenging short vowel sound!   We also did our pre-test for unit 3 on short i words so I could give each student a list that fits their skill level with this vowel sound.  We began the unit by sorting the new words into ending patterns, identifying double consonants and finding rhymes and using context clues to figure out sentences with missing words. We will spend next week working on short i words also! In our grammar and language work we worked on short/long vowels, end punctuation, plural/singular nouns, long vowel teams, nouns and verbs. 

*During math we practiced fact families, reviewed attributes of shapes (size, thick/thin, sides, color) and began to learn how to use function machines to identify number patterns and then continue the patterns ourselves. We also learned how to use the e-toolkit in the Everyday Math site - students have access there to TONS of math manipulatives (dice, base 10 blocks, pattern blocks, money, clocks, calendar, etc).  They had fun exploring and playing with a variety of materials that we use in class as tools.  This is a great thing for them to do on home days to build math skills.

*In reading workshop we began to learn about genre.  Our first category was fiction.  We made a chart of different clues that help us know a book fits into the fiction genre and kids had numerous ideas, such as animals talking, animals wearing clothes and going to school.  After I read them a fiction book we worked to record specific clues from the book that proved it was fiction.  Our current read aloud, Lulu and the Brontosaurus, gives lots of opportunity to talk about the common characteristics of fiction. 

*Writing workshop this week was time to stretch and add details to our small moment stories.  We worked on using strong words to make our writing stand out.  We also practiced how to read your own writing to see where one sentence ends and another begins.  This is tricky work in second grade and takes lots of practice.

*During science we began our third investigation into animal biodiversity, “How could we get more birds to visit a bird feeder?” In this lesson students investigated which birds are likely to visit particular feeders depending on what type of food they eat.  Then students designed and drew a prototype to fit a certain bird they would like to visit their feeder.  They had to think about what the bird eats, what position they like to eat from and how to keep the bird safe from cats.  Our young scientists had a lot of fun and worked hard problem solving and working with design features.  

Looking adorable for picture day!

We sure enjoyed the beautiful weather Thursday and Friday and took some extra time outdoors!

Picture Day Ready!

Sample of our chart to show the characteristics that make a book fiction

Kids loved using the Boomwhackers during music to keep rhythm!

Quality work!

We are having music in the room with our wonderful long-term sub, Ms. Baker, who is doing a terrific job making music fun, active and engaging.