Halloween Greetings!
We had a fantastic week in second grade. The children enjoyed watching the 1st grade musical and they participated in our annual Halloween parade! Mrs. Noble planned a memorable Halloween party for the children with the help of Mrs. Squillacioti and Mrs. Swanson. The children played Bingo, wrapped each other as mummies, and decorated picture frames. Mr. Noble took a photograph of our class and had zoomed off to have them developed in record time for all of the children to place inside their frames before the end of the day. They looked wonderful! Thanks to the parents for all of the contributions of drinks and munchies for the class, too! The children really had a wonderful time.
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| A sign of a fun afternoon? More good news.. we are expecting a new friend to be joining our classroom on Monday! The children and I are eager to meet and welcome him to our class next week! |
Spelling
The children practiced words this week with both long and short vowel sounds. All of the words also had a consonant cluster, also known as a consonant blend in which two consonants are next to each other and both of their sounds can be heard. (ex: slip, slide, task.) Next week the children will work with words that have the long /a/ sound, spelled ay and ai.
Reading
The common theme to our literacy activities this week was animal rescues. We began the week listening to The Woman, The Tiger, and the Jackal. This was a funny story about a tiger who was trapped in a hole. He persuaded a woman to help him out of the hole by promising not to eat her. As soon as he was out, he went back on his promise and was about to gobble her up when a craft jackal convinced the tiger to explain how the woman helped him. The tiger jumped back in the hole to show him and was trapped once again. New oral vocabulary words include: daring, survive, baffled, compassion, and lunge.
Our whole group story was called, “A Harbor Seal Pup Grows Up.” It was about a young seal that is unintentionally abandoned by its mother as she waits on the beach for her to return with her food. She is rescued, helped, and released back into the ocean. New vocabulary words from this selection include: examines, hunger, mammal, normal, rescued, and young. The comprehension strategy we focused on was summarizing- through sequencing the key events in beginning, middle, and end of the story.
The children also learned about the literary element of SIMILES. We now know that a simile is used to colorfully compare to things, using the words “like,” or “as.” Some examples we talked about include: “I am as hungry as a bear!” or “You are as busy as a bee.” Or “The stars sparkled like diamonds.” We read a poem called “The Puppy” which gave us the opportunity to find similes in print. The children wrote and illustrated their own similes! (Ask your child which one they came up with! )
Grammar
We reviewed that nouns are people, places and things. The children went on to learn how to make “regular” nouns plural by simply adding ‘s’ or ‘es.’ We noticed that in order to make words that end with y plural, we “change the y to an i and add ‘es!’ We went on to identify those irregular nouns that change entirely in order to make them plural. Ex: child–children, mouse-mice. We also reviewed capitalization and the use of commas in a list and in a friendly letter.
Writing
The students finished their three paragraph essays about the settlers’ journey traveling west. They talked about how difficult it must have been to travel along bumpy trails in a covered wagon with their entire families and only their most important belongings. The children are doing a very nice job imagining what this time period was like long ago. They organized their ideas into an “outrageous opening,” a “meaty middle,” and a “cool closing.” I am excited to see the children begin to organize their thoughts in this way! Their finished pieces are hanging in the hallway for you to view. They look great!
Math
This week the children reviewed place value in 2 and 3 digit numbers. We reviewed coin values and exchanges among different coins (5 pennies = 1 nickel, etc.) and the children practiced “buying” items in the Fruit and Vegetable Stand. We used our classroom Mimio to drag and drop the correct coins necessary to purchase these items. They were encouraged to find a variety of coin combinations to buy select items. (We are moving away from using only pennies... That is so last year! :) The children also reviewed telling time. They learned that the hour hand is always moving just as the minute hand it, only at a slower rate. We practiced telling time by only looking at the hour hand! We noticed that when the hour hand is half way in between two numbers, it is also about half past the smaller hour. (8:30)Coming Soon:
November 2: Field Trip to the Arlington Heights Police Department
November Book Orders Due
November 4: Vision and Hearing Screening; Jack Musich returns to Dryden to see the children's finished AH Landmark projects!
November 8: Photo Retakes
November 9: Visit from Mayor Mulder
November 11: No School, Veterans Day
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