Mrs. G.'s Chalk Talk: 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