Reminders:
There will be no school on Friday, October 6 or on Monday, October 9, 2023. We’ll see you on Tuesday, October 10, 2023!
Here is the Pease Mountain Volunteer Sign Up. Please join us if you are able to! (Remember, volunteers will need to complete the CVSD Procedure for Supervised Volunteers & Chaperones. This will include a background check and fingerprinting. Please refer to the CCS Family/Student Handbook 2023-2024 for more details on this procedure.)
Math: Our second grade mathematicians have been busy putting their growth mindset into practice this week. Our focus over the week has been on representing and solving addition and subtraction word problems. We began exploring a special math tool known as a number rack. This number rack contains 20 beads in all, 10 red and 10 white organized into two rows of ten. The number rack reinforces our number facts to 10 and introduces facts up to 20. We played a fast-paced math game known as “Flash Attack”. In this game students waited while the teacher built a number on their number rack. Then students were able to take a quick 3-second look at the rack. In this time they would need to determine how many beads were present on the left side of the rack. To explain how they saw the number they used equations to show how many were on the top and how many were on the bottom. Later in the week we pretended to go on a field trip via a train! Students practiced their 10s facts in order to figure out how many students were taking a nap and how many were awake. Seeing these numbers and explaining how we saw them was an important part of our Habits of Interactions that we learned about last week.
Word Study: During our word study practice we have looked more closely at digraphs, blends, and digraph blends. We have also zoomed in on the sound /k/ and when it is created by c, k, or ck. When the /k/ sound is at the end of a one syllable word we must listen to the vowel. If the vowel is short and followed immediately by the /k/ sound, then we need to use ck. If the short vowel is followed by a consonant sound and then the /k/ sound, then we need to use k.
If the /k/ sound is at the beginning of a word we need to think of which vowel follows it. We learned a helpful song to know when to use c and when to use k to make the /k/ sound. Check out the anchor chart from our lesson this week!
Writers’ Workshop: Our second grade narrative writers are sharing small moment stories of their own lives. Second graders are working on writing strong beginnings and endings. As a group, we leaned on our mentor authors and other authors to determine ways to write strong beginnings and endings. We have also introduced a second grade narrative writing checklist. Students used this checklist to plan for their writing by setting goals. Students have also begun to work with our second grade language conventions checklist to edit their work.
Readers’ Workshop: Our readers have been working hard! Students have been working with the idea that reading is thinking. We need to read the words as they are written (decode) and understand what we are reading (comprehension). In our minilessons, we focused on the core idea: Readers retell a story to help them understand the story better. We shared one retelling technique, the 5 Finger Retell, which supports retelling of major events while also synthesizing details.
SEL/Theme: This week we launched our Second Step curriculum. Social emotional learning is essential for individual and group success. The lessons we learn about from Second Step teach us how to learn as well as how to get along with others. This year we will focus on four major skill sets. Skills for Learning, Empathy, Emotional Management, and Problem Solving. This week’s lesson focused on respect. In our second grade learning communities we learned being respectful is important because it helps children be better learners. We also learned that there are many ways to be respectful in a learning environment. Some ideas we discussed included; being kind and polite, taking turns, paying attention and listening to the speaker, and using nonverbal/hand signals to let others know what we need/want. Take a moment to ask your second grader what is respect and why is it important to be respectful to others?
Quiet Time: Our students have ‘traveled’ far these past two weeks!
