Week 3 News

 Weekly News for 2-P 9-24-21

*Sneakers Tuesdays for PE and water bottles every day

*Picture day is Monday! Pictures can be ordered online after they have been taken.

        

*In math we are almost done with Unit 1 of Everyday Math.  Our work this week focused on facts that make 10, odd and even numbers, equivalent names for numbers, skip counting patterns and quarters.  We began math boxes, which we will do daily in math journals, so that all skills are continually reinforced.  On Friday we began “Rocket Math,” an individualized program to help us master our facts. We will start with addition.

*During reading workshop our learning was centered around fiction and that authors tell made up stories in fiction books. We read some great selections and identified the ways we knew a book was not real.  Examples included animals talking or going to school, animals baking cookies and learning to read. We are getting really good at recording our thinking and illustrations in our reader’s notebooks.

*In writing workshop we worked on ways we can bring our small moment stories to life by making the people in our stories talk and move.  We can also include how they are feeling and thinking, as we tell our stories bit by bit.  This week we shared our stories with each other and also practiced using proper capitalization and punctuation.

*We have completed our second spelling unit on short e words. Second graders practiced these words in many contexts and learned about antonyms, synonyms and double consonants. In addition to our spelling work, we began language/grammar work. Students showed a lot of interest in learning about nouns and verbs, vowel teams, punctuation and how to add detail to a sentence. 

*Our first science unit kicked off with a mystery about what scientists might find in a special cave that was filled with “poo.”  The scientists in 2-P were intrigued!  Throughout the week we worked through a Mystery Science investigation about animal classification.  We are learning all about biodiversity; the number of different species of plants and animals that live in a particular area.  Our focus now is on the animals and later we will concentrate on the plants. Throughout the unit we will come back to our beginning mystery about the cave and tie our new learning in with our original thinking. 

Fishing for 10!

Odd and Even Game!

Using 10 frames to identify odd/even numbers

Practicing skip counting by 2s as our mental math warm up!

Organizing our animal classification posters

Working to add a title and labels

Scientists showing off their classification system!

Reader's Notebook response

Beginning page of a small moment story

We use this anchor chart to help us remember how to bring our writing to life!

Identifying fiction

Identifying the author's message

On Friday we learned how to program our calculators to skip count!

Bit by bit small moment writing!

The kids are enjoying nonfiction books about animal biodiversity.  Thanks to our wonderful librarian, Ms. Luchies, for helping us find some great books!