April 28, 2017

Dear Families,

Thank you to all of the families who attended our Celebration of Learning on Friday! We hope that you saw many of  the amazing things your children are doing at school! If you didn't get a chance to attend, remind your child to bring their Leadership Notebook home to share!

Thanks so much for all of the donations to our Gardening Goodies Basket for the raffle for Family Fun Night. We have plenty of wonderful goodies for a lucky winner!
 

Some important dates coming up:

*May 5th: Family Fun Night

*May 9th: NWEA test for Reading
*May 9th: Visit from a Master Gardener!
*May 10th: Visit from a Beekeeper!

*May 16th: NWEA test for Math

 

Reading, Writing and Science!
Last week we continued to write our nonfiction texts, many almost finished! Hopefully you saw some rough drafts at our Celebration of Learning. Next week, we'll work on our pamphlets and our website so that we can teach our community about bees!

This week we'll  also learn about Author’s Purpose, the reason why an author writes something. We can remember the different purposes by thinking of PIE’ED: to persuade, to inform, to entertain, to explain, or to describe.

Math: 

This week we took a step back from our Everyday Math units and focused on fractions. We discussed how to compare fractions, reduce them and add them together. While this is not a part of our Everyday Math units, we think this is an important skill to be introduced to before your child goes to third grade. We will be starting unit 8 next week and if you are following along with the homelinks, we will be completing lessons 8.1-8.5. We'll keep you posted on when our next test will be. Here are the IXL skills for unit 8.
 

1.        T.1Name the two-dimensional shape

2.    T.2Select two-dimensional shapes

3.    T.3Count sides and vertices

4.    T.4Compare sides and vertices

5.    T.5Flip, turn, and slide

6.    T.6Identify congruent shapes

7.    T.7Symmetry

8.       U.1Name the three-dimensional shape

9.    U.2Select three-dimensional shapes

10. U.3Count vertices, edges, and faces

11.  U.4Compare vertices, edges, and faces

12. U.5Identify faces of three-dimensional shapes

13. U.6Identify shapes traced from solids

14. U.7Shapes of everyday objects I

15. U.8Shapes of everyday objects II

16.    Y.1Count equal groups

17. Y.2Identify multiplication sentences for equal groups

18. Y.3Write multiplication sentences for equal groups

19. Y.4Relate addition and multiplication for equal groups

20.Y.5Write multiplication sentences for arrays

 

 

 Have a great week!

April 21, 2017

Dear Families,

Report cards are going home today! Be sure to return the envelope! Thank you to the DCC for the great assembly today, Flying Aces! Order form for Field Day T-shirts are in your child's folder. 

Here's an update on our busy week in school:

Some important dates to remember:

*April 26th: Family Fun Night basket Donations due THIS WEDNESDAY

Our class' theme this year is Gardening Goodies!!! Thank you to the families that sent things in this week! We are still hoping for more donations to fill our basket. If you can donate anything, it would be greatly appreciated J

*April 28th: Celebration of Learning during the school day in the afternoon.  Please see previous emails for more information and please return the paper that went home, letting us know if you are able to attend that afternoon by MONDAY, April 24th

*May 5th: Family Fun Night

*May 9th: NWEA test: Reading

*May 16th: NWEA test: Math

Reading, Writing and Science: 

This week we reviewed text features and learned about five different types of nonfiction text structures: sequence, descriptive, problem and solution, compare and contrast, and cause and effect. Being able to recognize the text structure helps readers understand the purpose of the text and further increases our comprehension.  We practiced identifying text structure in some articles about camping. Ask your child to teach you about the different structures and look for each type in your nonfiction reading at home. We also spent lots of time reading articles, books and websites about our research topic, bees!

We had lots of fun this week continuing our research about bees and looking for answers to our Need to Knows (What do we need to know in order to answer our Driving Question?). We've sorted our Need to Knows into eight categories and so far, have researched jobs, life cycle, and stingers. Next week, we'll focus on looking for more answers and finally answering our Driving Question, "How can we as Botanists, help our ecosystem by saving the bees?"  

Math: 

We took our Unit 7 test on Tuesday.  Please look for the cover sheet with your child's results on how she/he did (sent home today, Friday). We also looked over Unit 8 targets and made goals on areas we felt we really needed to focus on.  Before we really dive into unit 8, we would like to focus on fractions for about a week. Although the 2^nd grade curriculum does not have fractions included in it, we feel that this is an important skill to be introduced to in 2^nd grade.

Here are the unit 8 IXL skills.  We are also sending home the at-home review soon.  As always, please keep this in a safe spot and review as needed throughout the unit.  We'll keep you posted on when our next test will be. Also, practice any fraction activities on IXL if you see any. 

1.        T.1Name the two-dimensional shape

2.     T.2Select two-dimensional shapes

3.     T.3Count sides and vertices

4.     T.4Compare sides and vertices

5.     T.5Flip, turn, and slide

6.     T.6Identify congruent shapes

7.     T.7Symmetry

8.     U.1Name the three-dimensional shape

9.     U.2Select three-dimensional shapes

10. U.3Count vertices, edges, and faces

11. U.4Compare vertices, edges, and faces

12. U.5Identify faces of three-dimensional shapes

13. U.6Identify shapes traced from solids

14. U.7Shapes of everyday objects I

15. U.8Shapes of everyday objects II

16. Y.1Count equal groups

17. Y.2Identify multiplication sentences for equal groups

18. Y.3Write multiplication sentences for equal groups

19. Y.4Relate addition and multiplication for equal groups

20. Y.5Write multiplication sentences for arrays

Don't forget to complete some activities with your child on our character trait of the month: Conservation.

Have a great weekend!

April 13, 2017

Dear Families,

We need books for our Little Free Library!  If you are doing any spring cleaning, please consider donating books to our little library. It was pretty empty on Thursday. Lots of kids are borrowing, they're just not in the habit of returning any yet!  Just write on the book, "Deerfield Little Free Library," and you can also add a Donated by __________, if you'd like! Hopefully, when families see that, they'll remember to return them when they're finished. No need to send them to class, just tuck them into the library if you happen to drive by DF this weekend.

Also, if you happen to shop at Kroger (Grand River) this weekend, you may just be lucky enough to have your groceries packed in paper bags that were decorated by our students! The third graders are leading this month's service project, Taking Care of the Earth, Reduce, Reuse and Recycle!

Some important dates to remember:

*April 14: No school/ Good Friday

*April 26th: Family Fun Night basket Donations due

Our class theme for our basket this year is Gardening!  Donate your favorite gardening tool, seeds, fairy garden item etc.  to be put in our Family Fun Night basket! (There are a lot of gardening items at the Dollar Store and Fairy Garden items at Home Depot). 

 

*April 28th: Celebration of Learning during the school day in the afternoon.  Please see the email sent home earlier this week for more information.

*May 5th: Family Fun Night

Reading:

This week we spent time finishing up our book clubs and creating timelines, informational presentations,  and thinking routines to share our thinking about our books.  We also began reading informational texts and articles about bees! The research has been incredible! Students are motivated and very excited about learning all they can about these interesting creatures.

Writing: 

We started our new unit of Research in writing this week.  We learned about paraphrasing text using a "key word" strategy.  Students took notes from their reading and used our Symbaloo page to read informational articles. Next week, they'll start organizing their information using headings and subheadings to begin writing their informational pieces. We'll learn about text features and text structure and see how author's use them in their own writing.

Math: 

We had a busy week finishing up unit 7!  We continued to practice measuring and learning about line plots.  Next week we will review on Monday and take the unit 7 test on Tuesday.  Be sure to have your child look over the "at home review" sent home at the beginning of the unit.

Science: We are combining our reading, writing, and science to learn about bees. Our plant unit is a Project Based Learning Unit, so our entry event was based on bees! We've created hundreds of questions using a questioning technique called QFT (question, formulation technique) and now we're buzzy trying to find the answers to these questions. We're using websites, books and articles to research and learning a lot about using reputable sources to find the answers to our inquiry. We've got lots of plans to share our learning, such as writing informational texts to put in our Little Free Library, write online newsletters, newscasts, and even writing surveys to see how people feel about bees. Our bee studies will help us later in the month when we begin to study plants.  

Don't forget to complete some activities with your child on our character trait of the month: Conservation.

IXL SKILLS FOR UNIT 7

IXL Skills: 1^st Grade: B17, 2nd Grade: E 17, E19, G13, G15

IXL Skills: 1^st Grade: N4, N11, 2nd Grade: S2, S8

IXL Skills: Second Grade: R6, R7

IXL Skills: 1^st Grade: N4, N11, 2nd Grade: S2, S8

Have a great weekend!