This page will be utilized as a more "detailed" version of our paper weekly newsletter. Check back to this page towards the end of each week to see what it is we will be learning in our core areas! During more challenging or tricky units, I will also be posting some hints and tricks on how we approach the topic in class.
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Math--Measuring to the nearest inch and centimeter.
This is a very important unit as far as life applicable skills go. I tell the students that this is something they'll need to be able to do for so many jobs but also for home projects and even some decorating! I find the best way to work on this unit is just to practice, practice, practice. If you have things at home you need measured please encourage your student to help with this! A common "struggle" with measuring in 2nd grade is accurately lining up the end of the ruler with what they're measuring. Sometimes, students want to start measuring an item beginning one inch or centimeter into the ruler. Another common misconception or confusion is identifying the difference between centimeters and inches. We spend a lot of time discussing how the length of a centimeter is much shorter than the length of an inch. We try to apply this understanding by saying if you measured a pencil and said that it was 18 inches long that would be over the length of a standard ruler so it should tell your brain immediately you accidentally used centimeters! We try to push past just measuring to using our mathematical brains to identify patterns and relationships this week. Reading--describing how characters act in a fiction story. We just spent a great week finding morals within a fiction story and talking about how fiction stories can teach us how to be great friends and contribute to the world around us. This week, we'll use that inferential thinking to help us focus on characters. We'll use our reading skills to first identify a problem or struggle for the character. After that, we'll look at how does the character respond to that struggle. Do they give up? Find a creative solution? Go and ask for help? We will also continue to emphasize how the way these characters respond to challenges are either a great example for us to follow or might be more of a "non-example."
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Math--Even and odd numbers. Students have reviewed which numbers are even or odd for most of the year. However, our switch now is to understand WHY a number is either even or odd, what makes it an even number versus an odd one. Our goal is to move students beyond memorizing the even and odd numbers and focus on a deeper level of understanding. We will spend the week categorizing even numbers as those that can be shared or divided amongst 2 equal groups. We will also focus our understanding of the difference between 2 equal groups and equal groups of 2. Reading--determining the moral of a fiction story. This is one of my favorite units within our reading curriculum! Students don't always associate fiction stories with "learning" because they're not always filled with facts and information. Our goal this week is to understand that fiction stories help teach us LIFE lessons through the character's actions, words, and thoughts. This week we get the chance to interpret how a character behaves throughout the story and help us learn a lesson that can be applied to our own lives with our friends and family. I tell the students that when they're picking a moral of a story it should follow 3 major characteristics: 1. Is taught to us BY the character but is not ABOUT the character (The lesson in The Boy Who Cried Wolf is not a lesson about the boy, rather a lesson on the importance of telling the truth). 2. Does not begin with a negative word like "don't" or "never". It should be a POSITIVE action. 3. Should be a realistic lesson. Fables are often stories filled with animal characters who can talk like humans. This does not mean the moral should be about the animals! Make sure it's a lesson that you can apply to your everyday life. Feel free to ask students what the moral of a story or even a movie is throughout this week and continue to use the word moral to build it into your student's vocabulary!
Spelling--We are transitioning from one long 'a' sound pattern to the next! This week we will be focusing on the 'ay' long 'a' pattern. For MOST words, the 'ay' option comes at the very end of a word. While there are a few exceptions to this rule within our weekly list, most words do follow this pattern. We try to emphasize to students that if you hear the long 'a' sound towards the end of the word, there's a good chance it could be 'ay' that spells it!
Earlier this week, I sent home a yellow packet that helps explain some of the ways we divide syllables, syllable types, and some ideas for your student to practice their words at home. Reading--We are continuing our work with nonfiction reading this week but switching our focus to connecting steps within a text. I equate this to following steps in directions or instructions for students. What steps do we have to do FIRST? As with cooking or constructing, if we read steps out of order or skip steps, we won't fully understand what it is we're being asked to do. There will be a heavy emphasis on the transition words first, next, and last this week. The best way to help your students with ANY of our reading is to ask they questions about what they've read and encourage them to look back in the book as a basis for their answer! Math--Students have worked incredibly hard on developing strategies for solving addition and subtraction problems while even working on solving number stories that have 2 steps and require BOTH operations to be utilized! I continually remind the 2nd graders how amazing it is that they are accomplishing so much! We will be taking a break from basic operations this week and switching to a focus on geometry! Most 2nd graders are able to name their basic shapes by this point. We will be working to understand that many shapes are named for their number of shapes. Understanding the root of penta, hexa, and even octa can help us know both what shape we're naming AND how many sides the shape has! We will also put a huge emphasis on vocabulary this week! Primarily, we will be working on understanding what vertices, angles, and sides are when referring to different shapes. Typically, students have the most difficulty with the concept of an angle. I would recommend continually exposing students to different angles at home and reinforcing the idea that angles and vertices, although close in proximity, are NOT the same thing! Spelling- This week students will work on the silent e syllable, sometimes called the magic e. This refers to words or final syllables that have a long vowel sound (a vowel that says its name) and ends in the letter e. For words on our lists this week that have more than one syllable, the final syllable should end in a long vowel sound, followed by one consonant, and then a final e. Last week everyone improved tremendously on their spelling lists as they continue to get more used to the routine, well done!
Reading-Students continue their journey with nonfiction reading this week. Students will be asked to describe connections between historical events within a nonfiction text. A huge focus of this week will be understanding cause and effect relationships. Our primary focus will be identifying KEY details in a paragraph and then connecting them with another key detail in a following paragraph. The biggest struggle I usually see with this skill is students want to choose any detail from the article without thinking if the detail they've chosen is a) important enough to their understanding of the article and b) connected to the other details in the article. For example, if a student wrote down a detail about Betsy Ross being asked to make the first flag, then their next detail should have something to do with Betsy Ross's next step in making the flag. The words first, next, then, and last will be very important this week. Math-students will work on not only interpreting data on both bar and picture graphs, they'll also be asked to use their "readers of math" skills to read number stories that accompany the graphs. Students will have to 1) read the data displayed on each graph 2)determine what the number story is asking them do with the data and 3)decide what strategy would be most efficient for them to solve with. Reading: Identifying nonfiction main idea. This week students will be reading nonfiction articles and working to identify the main idea/topic. In its simplest terms, we tell the students that the main topic is what the text is MOSTLY about. As we read, we look for words or phrases that repeat that could help us identify the main topic. The article's title also can help us pinpoint what the main topic is. I find that the hardest part of identifying an article's main topic is when students just pick out one key detail and repeat it rather than think about what EACH paragraph is teaching us about. We do push students to be a bit more specific than just saying the article is about "alligators" for example. We would ask what specifically ABOUT alligators are we learning? A main topic could be "alligators have many traits that make them great hunters."
Math: We've spent the last two weeks solidifying our addition and subtraction strategies while also exploring the relationships between the two operations. THIS week we will focus on "being a reader of math." We're going to pay close attention to words used in number stories to help us decide if we need to use addition OR subtraction to solve. We'll practice identifying key words/phrases in the number story that help us understand which operation to use. We will then be able to practice the strategies we've learned to help us solve the number stories. Spelling: This week 2nd grade will begin their study and practice of their first list now that we've practiced the routine. We meet every day in all 3 groups for 30 minutes to practice our words, discuss their meanings/parts of speech, and use our decoding skills. We do recommend that 2nd graders continue to practice a few nights at home each week to continue building their spelling skills.
Reading: Since we have a short week, the students will not be starting a new unit our reading curriculum. Instead, we will dive into our August/September edition of our Scholastic Storyworks magazines. The 2nd graders typically love using these magazines because they have engaging nonfiction and fiction articles. Our primary focus with the magazines will be to continue building our comprehension habits of going back into the text to look for our answers and not relying on just what we remember! Math: Students are going to use some of their understanding of last week's addition strategies to help them build efficient subtraction strategies. We will put an emphasis on pushing students to move beyond counting on their fingers towards conceptual understanding by drawing out their thinking. An important strategy we will focus on this week is counting up. Starting at the lower number in a subtraction problem and counting up to the higher number. For example, in 20 - 16 we could start at 16 on a number line and count upwards 4 times until we get to 20. We really push students this week to understand a subtraction answer as a difference, or the distance between two numbers. Next week will be our first "real" feeling week as far as academics go! Diagnostics are complete and we are ready to launch fully into our curriculum!
Spelling--Next week will be a "dry run" of sorts to get students used to our spelling program in 2nd grade. We share students between myself, Mrs. Clark, and Mrs. Zappe usually using varying lists. Next week, all students will have the same list so we can solely focus on routine building. You can find next week's words on the bright green newsletter in your student's Take Home Folder. Math--Our focus will be on the "mental math" side of basic addition facts. While we do utilize mental math strategies, we often encourage students to draw out their work in order to show their thinking and share ideas with their peers. A heavy focus for us will be using doubles facts and our understanding of how to make a 10 to aid in our basic facts. Eventually our goal will be memorization of single digit facts but beginning with a strong conceptual understanding first. Reading--2nd grade whole group reading lessons are primarily focused around comprehension. This week we will begin a nonfiction unit around asking and answering questions. In 2nd grade, we stress the importance of a reader ALWAYS asking questions throughout their reading (before, during, & after) to ensure that their brain doesn't go on 'autodrive' while reading the words and really thinking about what they understand. We will also begin to introduce helpful strategies to use when answering multiple choice questions! Next week we will begin our fall session of i-Ready diagnostic testing in both reading and math. These are assessments we use in order to measure growth in both areas over the course of a school year. For this first round of diagnostics, the best way to help your student prepare for the tests is to get a good night's sleep each evening and a big breakfast each morning! We will do our diagnostics completely on the students' chromebooks for about 30 minutes each morning during our reading block.
Looking ahead to math next week, we will be reinforcing students' understanding of finding sums in simple addition problems with a heavy focus on doubles facts. Any practice of single digit doubles facts would be great to work on at home! Welcome new 2nd grade families! I am BEYOND excited to get our new school year up and running! I wanted to start the year by letting you all know that these first few days of school will be spent primarily getting to know each other better and to build our community! There will not be any graded work until after the first full week of school. I am sure there is a range of feelings out there about the school year starting but rest assured no matter how your child may be feeling, I cannot wait to work with them and look forward to an outstanding year together! |