September 26th

      Writing

     We finished up our practice with end punctuation. Now that we have gone over periods, question marks, and exclamation points they have become part of our “No Excuse” writing. This means that I expect to see these end marks in every piece of writing the 2^nd graders do.

     For writing stories the kids chose a friend to write about. They wrote a short story describing the friend, what makes them a good friend, and what kinds of thing they like to do together.

     -Ask your child to tell you a sentence that goes with each type of punctuation we learned.

     -Ask who they chose to write about. Why did they chose that friend?

Adding words to our compound word list

Searching for compound words in books

Literacy

      This week we discussed visualizing. We practiced by reading different poems and talking about the images we made in our head while reading. Students also drew what we “saw” and compared those to what their friends drew. We discussed that even though we read the same poem, people drew different things because they had different schema's (or background information).

      The students also finished up their community helper research and created community helpers with sentences and information sharing what they learned.

Our next unit is Force and Motion.

      -Ask about visualizing, what does it mean? As you read this week discuss what “movies” or pictures you are making in your minds.

Working hard during literacy work time

Math

      -Unit 2 is all about Addition Strategies. We have already learned +0. +1, +2, making 10, and doubles. This week we talked about how knowing our making 10’s and double facts can help solve other addition facts. For example, knowing 7+3=10 helps solve 7+2=9 and 7+4=11.

      -Ask your child what is a making 10 fact? What is an example of a double fact and how can knowing those help you solve other addition problems?

Working on "using doubles" facts and explaining thinking

Practicing Math Facts on Xtramath.com

September 19th

Welcome to parents of the 2014-2015 2^nd grade class!

My hope is to update this blog at least twice a month, with emails in between if necessary. I will email out when I do add updates so please watch for those emails!

First up, some photos from our tailgate! We played addition top-it, and the winner got to move up 10 “yards”. The kids loved it!

Writing:

We read the book Shortcut by Daniel Crews and talked about how authors write stories about things that have happened in their own lives. We brainstormed a list of things that have happened to us and then each child wrote a short story.

Ask your child about their story. What did they write about?

We also did some re-learning of punctuation. A big thing I want kids to be doing by the end of 2^nd grade is using end punctuation, and to use it correctly. We reviewed when we use periods, question marks, and exclamation marks. The students did a book hunt for these types of punctuation and what types of sentences they were in. We did a sort with punctuation and created a punctuation mini-book.

Ask your child about the 3 types of end marks. What are 3 different sentences using each of these end marks?

Reading:

Students got on the computers to do some research about their community helper. Each child has chosen a community helper and will be creating a poster with their learning.

Which community helper are you researching? What new information have you learned?

We also discussed reading with a purpose. We learned that we can read for fun, to learn, or just to relax. We practiced reading to learn. We read books and used the sentence starter: “I remember…” for new information learned.

Ask your child what are some of the reasons people read?

We also learned the routines for our weekly word sorts. Each child will be working with a group to do a word sort focusing on a spelling pattern that they need to learn.

Ask your child if they remember what some of the activities are that we do with our word sort envelopes.

Practicing speed sort

Writing in her reading response journal about the book she read during literacy time!

Hard at work on reading response journal

This group is working on their punctuation sort

Math

We finished up the first unit in math and the kids took their first tests Thursday and Friday! The test is split into 2 days because one day is testing their learning from the unit and the second day is an open response. For this assessment the kids solve a problem and then write down how they solved the math problem. A new focus in math is working on explaining our math thinking so that someone else knows how to solve a similar math problem.

Show your child a math problem (what is 10 more than 25, or which number is less, 13 or 31. Then ask them how they got to their answer).

Building with base-10 blocks. Then they had to write how many they used for their houses!

Exploring area with shapes