April 24th

Writing

The students have been hard at working writing many types of poems! So far they have done: List poems, “two-words-on-a-line” poems, riddle poems, concrete poems, and diamond poems. It has been so fun to hear all of their ideas for writing poetry! They will be assembling these into poetry books at the end of our unit.

Reading through poetry books 

Reading

This week the class used a lot of their literacy work time to finish up their planet research and create planet posters. They have used both books and computers to do research. It has been good practice to work collaboratively in small groups.

Students also did some work with the difference between facts and opinions. We will use this learning to do some opinion writing during May.

Over the next couple of weeks I will be pulling individual students to do their reading benchmarks. For this I read with each child (usually 2 or 3 stories) and they tell me all about what they have read. These help form my reading instructional groups.

Moon phases with mini oreos!

Writing sentences about the moon

Facts and opinions with Skittles

Mercury

Venus

Mars

Jupiter

Saturn

Uranus

Neptune

Pluto

Math

We have spent some time reviewing many 2^nd grade concepts. Our biggest focus this week has been on rounding (so we can work on making estimates next week). We practiced round 2 and 3 digit numbers to the nearest 10 and nearest 100. The class will apply this next week when they work on making estimates.

We also learned about splitting rectangles, squares, and circles into equal shares. The class practiced with halves, thirds, and fourths. 

Creating equal shares with squares

April 3rd

2nd grade is Out of This World!

Writing

We finished up our letter writing unit this week! The kids had fun writing cards to people and writing letters to family and friends who live far away.

Our focus was to make sure that all letters have a date, greeting, body (with details), closing, and signature. The class worked really hard on these letters and LOVED writing them!

Our next unit is poetry!

Writing letters and addressing envelopes

Reading

Our focus this week in reading was researching and reading about stars. The class read a chapter from our science book, and article on PebbleGo, a book about constellations, and did research on our weebly about stars. They then took everything they learned a made a poster about the stars with themselves as the main constellation.

In reading groups we were still focused on using the text to prove our answers to questions. Groups read about the International Space Station or meteors.

Constellations and star facts

Math

This week in math we finished Unit 8 which covered geometry and creating arrays. The class had the chance to explorations on Thursday to work with dividing shapes up equally and describing and creating shapes on geoboards.

We will be taking the next couple of weeks to review concepts before moving on to multiplication and division. We will review: telling time, making change for $1, story problems using money beyond $1, adding/subtracting 3 digit numbers with and without regrouping, and rounding/estimating. I will send home the Unit 9 homelink once we start that.

Creating arrays with addition or multiplication problems

Mystery Shapes on geoboards

Practicing partitioning shapes

Array concentration