Weekly News 9-29-23

 Weekly News for 2-P 9-29-23

*Sneakers Thursdays for PE and water bottles every day

*Library books are due on Wednesdays

*In math we completed the first unit with lessons on base10 blocks (building structures and counting their value) and an introduction to the concept of “area” through tiling rectangles. Students are reviewing for the Unit 1 Assessment next week and that will come home for you to review after I’ve scored them. Unit 2 starts soon and focuses on fact strategies. 

*During reading workshop we practiced identifying story elements in fictional stories (characters, setting, problem and solution). We also practiced what it means to categorize a book as fiction. In our phonics program we are reviewing all short vowel sounds, digraphs (ck, sh, th, ch) and building great automaticity with reading and writing words with these patterns. This is helping improve our spelling as well. Kids love building words with their magnetic letters!

*In writing workshop we learned strategies for writing strong endings. We worked on how to describe parts of your story with specific details. We practiced this by describing gourds! Each child is working on individual goals during writing time that will help move them along as a writer. We practiced editing our own writing with a special tool that reminds us what to look for when rereading our work: Capitalization Understanding Punctuation Spelling: CUPS!  

*We have completed our third spelling unit on short i words. Next up is short o words. In addition to daily practice in our spelling books using the words in a variety of ways, we also do dictation with our words to use the words in context and practice sentence mechanics.

*This week our science work centered on habitat diversity with a lesson called “Why Would Wild Animals Visit a Playground?” In this lesson students solve the mystery of why a group of bighorn sheep would leave their desert habitat to visit a different habitat. We recorded observations of the diversity of life in each habitat to help us understand how the living and non-living parts of a habitat support the animals that live there.

*In Go2 Science we got to see Beth and Curtis explore in the rainforest, where we saw our first blue morpho butterflies, plus many other interesting creatures. We learned about the layers in the rainforest and got to vote about the next location for finding butterflies. We love checking off all the animals we see on our “Panama Bingo” chart. 

Art class last week

Odd and Even Race!

Examining a gourd....for writing!

Sight Word Game - fun way to practice our words

We did story maps this week....

and we LOVE Stanley books!

Writing specific details about our gourds

We tried to compare them to other things.

Sorting dominos that fit with even numbers in math

Some gourd descriptions

Math architect!

We built base 10 block structures...

and then counted the total worth of the building.

Doubles dash!

It's a great way to practice those double facts!

More base 10 buildings

Playing Roll & Read with our phonics pattern

Enjoying some DEAR time (DROP EVERYTHING AND READ!)

This writer uses her CUPS tool for proofreading her story.

Checking for capital letters and periods

We worked on good leads to our story this week.

Rereading to make sure our stories make sense!

These writers are creating great pieces!

On Friday we shared a favorite page with the whole class!

We are practicing how we can use our CUPS checklist to make sure our work is accurate.

Big Author's Share on Friday afternoon

It was fun to listen to each others' stories.