Reminders:
No school Friday, March 24, 2023
Home-school folders are sent each week and contain multiple examples of your child’s work as well as their artwork and other important information regarding their time here at CCS. One thing you may notice is their Workboard Menu. This menu is designed for students to practice their literacy and math skills independently. Some weeks, students may complete the packet/worksheets in their entirety. Other weeks, they may have some “leftovers” brought home in their home-school folders. While completing the packet is not a necessity, students can certainly complete them at home at their own pace.
Spring Family Conferences are continuing next week. Please consider signing up for a time to meet. If this timeline does not work for you please let me know so that we can better plan a time to connect about your second grader.
Math: Our mathematicians were busy this week as they continued working with coins, dollar bills, their values, and solving problems with money. Students practiced recognizing coins and their value individually as well as in small collections. To help strengthen their ability to quickly find the total we practiced counting on by 10s and 5s from various starting numbers. Students were able to efficiently count forward with an understanding of how the repetitive addition of 5 will create a pattern. Our squad practiced recording these totals as both cents-￠and dollars-$. An important tool they learned how to use was the decimal point. The decimal point acts as a divider between dollars and cents. Check out the slide below!
Writing: Our experts have been hard at work crafting and refining their nonfiction pieces. On Tuesday, students wrapped up the pre-bend portion of the unit. This pre-bend gave students the opportunity to revisit the skills and anchor charts they learned in their first grade nonfiction writing unit.
On Thursday, we began the first bend of our second grade nonfiction writing unit! Second graders are experts on many topics and subjects. We brainstormed as a class and independently the things we know a lot about and are passionate and excited to share with others. We then looked at some familiar nonfiction mentor authors such as Gail Gibbons and Seymour Simon to gain inspiration and guidance from these seasoned writers.
Word Study: “Goodbye” Unit 9 and “hello!” Unit 10! Students wrapped up the r-controlled unit of word study with an end of unit assessment. Students showed all they knew about the r-controlled vowels ar, or, er, ir, ur and how to use them in single and multiple syllable words.
We also launched Unit 10 which will focus on vowel teams and their corresponding “double-vowel” syllable types. Students were excited to take this important next step as second graders. Not only will they work on recognizing vowel teams as readers but they will also learn how to use these syllable types in their own writing! But first, we must reintroduce each team as well as how to mark this syllable type.
Reading: Second grade readers have begun a new reading unit, “Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power.” In the first bend, or group of lessons, we will focus on fluency. Tim Raskinski, a professor and reading researcher out of Kent State University, refers to fluency as the bridge between phonics and comprehension. During this bend, students worked to…
Science: Our geologists have continued their exploration of Pebbles, Sand and Silt. Last week, students worked with the question: How can rocks be separated by size? They used a new tool, the screen, to work with their group to separate gravel, pebbles, and sand. This week, scientists focused on sand, asking the question: Is there an earth material smaller than sand? Students learned that scientists use water as a tool to help separate smaller rock particles from larger ones. We worked with the vocabulary particle, sink, settle, layer, and silt.
SEL/Theme: This week, we began our fourth and final unit in Second Step: Problem Solving. The work of this unit includes: solving problems, taking responsibility, responding to exclusion, and playing fairly. During our lesson, we worked to understand that before we can solve a problem, we need to start by calming down. We reviewed our ‘How to Calm Down’ steps and then began to learn the Problem-Solving STEP. We began by focusing on the first step, Saying the problem without using blaming words. Next week, we will continue learning the Problem-Solving STEP.
Last Friday, our second graders had a blast during our Whole School Assembly and surprise Whole School Celebration!
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