September 27th

Our Lead21 unit this week was focused on different roles in our community. We are also learning about rural, suburban, and urban communities and how they have changed over the years. It worked out wonderfully that we could have a speaker from the Ankeny Historical Society come and talk with us about how Ankeny has changed.

We learned that Ankeny was founded by John and Sarah Ankeny, that there was only one elementary school when our speaker was growing up, and that we used to have a fireworks factory.

Our guest speaker from the Ankeny  Historical Society

 Another focus in reading was making inferences. An inference is when we use our schema (what we already know) and clues from text to help us learn something that the author didn't explain in the story.

To introduce it I brought in a bag of my stuff and the kids had to look through my things and make inferences about me.

I think the kids favorite thing this week was using computers to research our inquiry questions. We learned how to use a couple research sites (Searchasaurus and Google Safesearch) to look up questions. We also talked about taking notes (not just copying) and that the Internet is not always the best place to find our answers (they also wrote interviews and looked in books). Next week we will be taking our research and creating posters of their learning. 

In writing we were researching ways that author's start their stories. We found that many stories start with a description of the setting or characters, a question, or Once Upon a Time. Students used these to start writing their own fiction stories. 

Working on their fiction stories

Looking for story starts

 In math we worked hard on fact families this week. If you still have the fact triangles from Back to School Night (or if you have the ones I sent home with your child) these are great practice for quick facts. 

We will be taking a test next week on fact families, and will move onto a new topic next week. This doesn't mean we'll leave addition and subtraction facts in the past! Many of the games that students play are focused on adding and subtracting so they get practice every day. 

2nd Grade Does the Zoo

Before I show you all the wonderful pictures from our AMAZING day at the zoo here are a couple of things we did this week!

Writing:

We wrote an outline for our own fiction stories. The students had to figure out who their characters were going to be, what the setting, problem, and solutions were going to be as well. 

In writing we also are working on correct capitalization. We did some book hunts for capital letters and sorted them into groups. On Monday we will be labeling those groups so that we have a great anchor chart of when we should use capital letters in our writing. 

Reading/Social Studies

We incorporate Social Studies into our literacy time. This week we started exploring different types of communities: rural, suburban, and urban. The first day students students went through and labeled what they noticed in each type of community. 

We also had pajama day this week!

We also spent time this week discussing author's purpose. We use the acronym PIE for Persuade, Inform, Entertain. We looked through different books to decide why the author wrote each book. We will continue to work on this in both reading and writing throughout the year. 

Math

We have practiced our "quick" math facts of using doubles, doubles +1, doubles +2, and -0/-1. The games that students played this week focused on using the facts that we have learned. They are recording lots of math problems each day in hopes that they will become quick memory facts so that they don't need to use number lines/hundreds charts/fingers to do their math facts.

Using their knowledge of -10 to play squares

The highlight of the week was our trip to the Blank Park Zoo!!

I will add pictures as I get them from the different parents that came on our trip, but here are some to get us started. :)

First we had a program from the zoo where they shared 4 animals with us.

Then we toured the zoo! It was a beautiful day to walk around and we all had an amazing time!

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Of course that much fun is exhausting. :)