Mrs. Cox's Class: October 25th

Writing

Each week the students write "Weekend News" which allows them to tell about their weekend and also gives me a weekly writing sample to share how they grow as writers throughout the year.

I try to let the kids share their Weekend News with one or two kids each week so they have practice reading their writing to someone else.

This week we also finished publishing our fiction stories. The students had to add covers to their books so we took some time to explore different books and what we noticed they included on the covers.

We then shared our stories with a 1st grade class. They loved hearing our stories and the 2nd graders loved sharing them!

We continued our study of nouns with the difference between proper nouns and common nouns. This combines our learning of parts of speech with what words should be capitalized. The students then created a "Proper Noun Parade" where they drew pictures of proper nouns and wrote sentences about them.

The Titanic was made of metal.

We also spent some time this past week with end marks. The students found examples of end marks in books and then sorted them into these 4 groups.

We discussed when we would use type of end mark and then again looked for specific examples. I wanted to really hit hard using periods correctly, but also including question marks and exclamation points into our writing.

We found that Mo Willems Pigeon books had a lot of examples of each type of end mark so we made our own pigeons with exclamations, questions and statements.

We were lucky enough to have someone from the US Women's Olympic Volleyball Team come and read to our class! She read Oh the Places You'll Go and the kids were wonderful listeners!

The students wrote their inquiry questions for this unit. It was wonderful to see what kinds of questions they came up with. :)

In math we worked on double digit addition and subtraction.

Students playing spinner double digit addition

You may notice your child bringing home addition or subtraction pages. We take "Mad Minutes" every Thursday. I give the students 3 minutes to do as many addition or subtraction problems as they can. Each child has set personal goals and are only racing against themselves. They then graph their scores on Fridays. It is motivating for kids to see their scores go up.

In order for me to help with addition facts we have been talking about the "quick" facts we already know. This week we talked about ways to make 10. If a student is able to look at 6 + 4 and automatically know it is 10 then they don't have to count up, use their fingers or spend any time thinking about it. This is our goal for 2nd grade!