January 8

 

Dear Families,

Happy New Year and welcome back!

Here is what is happening in the Second Grade Team!

Reminders:

*January 13th- Multicultural Night 6:00-8:00 p.m.

*January 18th- Martin Luther King Day/ No school for students

*January 29th- End of marking period, early dismissal for students- records day in the p.m.

Language Arts

Reading Workshop: This week the second graders reviewed reciprocal teaching using four basic thinking strategies to help with comprehension. These are predicting, questioning, summarizing or retelling  and monitoring and clarifying. Book Club protocol was also  discussed as we will begin our book clubs soon! This week we focused on reading Realistic Fiction books. and creating a “What we Notice” chart about the characteristics of  Realistic Fiction Books.

Word Work: We are very excited about our new Wordly Wise Vocabulary Books that we will be using to learn about vocabulary. Students learned the routine and format of using these workbooks and we will use them during our word work  or Win Time.. Check out this website for games and extra practice with these vocabulary activities:

www.WordlyWise3000.com

Be sure to go to the free activities at the bottom of the page and go to “student page.”

Writing: Our new writing unit this month is “Realistic Fiction.” We read many realistic fiction books in Reading Workshop which helped us to notice the characteristics that we will include in our own writing.   We are learning how to read like writers and have begun to notice craft while reading. We are attempting to try to include craft in our writing, like some of the authors we have been studying.  We created idea lists this week so that we will be ready to begin our own stories next week.

Math: This week we took our Unit 5 pretest and began learning unit 5 concepts. Please remember to practice using the Home links and math websites for extra learning at home. Practice counting change (pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters). We completed Lessons 5.1, 5.2 while spending a little extra time on counting back change.

Science: We finished up our Land forms studies by learning about the 3 states of matter and properties of water.

Homework:

*Math Homelinks and finish up any unfinished pages in the old math workbooks!

*IXL math, Everyday Math  and Xtra Math Websites: Practice any counting coin activities

*Read ( second graders should be able to read 10-20 minutes each night)

*Wordly Wise- Explore the website!

Have a great weekend!