The latest news in 2-2!

Another full week in 2nd grade has gone by!

* On Friday afternoon, Dryden practiced a school-wide fire drill. Our class stayed together, remained quiet, and did just what they were supposed to do. Way to go! It was a proud teacher moment. :)

* Permission slips for our 1st field trip of the year went home this week. We will be visiting the Arlington Heights Historical Museum, the Arlington Heights Memorial Library, and North School Park for Lunch on October 4th. Please return your permission slip/fees as soon as you can. Thank you for those that I've already received!

* You might notice some interesting photos in our photo slide show! A new job this year is the classroom photographer. The child's perspective is an interesting one! Thank you to PJ who snapped some photos for us during the week.

* Thank you also to our blogger Ava, who did a phenomenal job updating the blog every day! She definitely hit the highlights! I especially liked to see how complimentary Ava was of her classmates. What a sweet girl!

On to the academic update...

Spelling

This week our words focused on words with the short and long /a/ sounds! Next week our words will have the short and long /i/ sounds!

Reading

Our theme this week was “Firefighters at Work.” New vocabulary words were: flames, forest, heat, safe and tell. These words popped up everywhere! They were on our spelling list, in our whole group stories, in our fluency passages, and even in our small group stories! The comprehension strategy we worked on included summarizing – by identifying the main idea and details. We completed a graphic organizer to help us pull out this key information from the passage. Based on our theme this week, it might be a good time to discuss fire safety in your home! Its so important to know what to do in case of an emergency.

Grammar

The children practiced identifying the subject in a sentence this week. They also worked to add subjects to incomplete sentences. We identified the parts of and punctuated a friendly letter.

Writing

Our autobiographies are complete! The children had a huge part in the publishing process. They told ME how they wanted their final copy to look! They could choose between a folded flip open version (showing each stage of their life) or a flat poster, and they chose the poster. Then they decided they wanted a colored background, so they asked me to create panels with lines for them to write on and glue to their poster. They even told me how they’d like to glue a white bubble at the top for the title and their name! It was such fun watching them take ownership of their published writing! These projects are hanging in the hallway, and will be coming home soon. They worked very hard, and the tidbits they chose to include in their writing are fun to read.

Math

The children took their Unit 1 assessment! We moved right into Unit 2. We started off with reviewing the parts of a story problem, including a unit box, number model and a labeled answer. The children solved these problems, and practiced creating their own, too. The children will be really focusing on learning their math facts. We’ve already learned our doubles, so we moved into our “doubles +1” facts. The children chanted “think about the double of the lower number, then add… one…. more!” This helped them not only identify which problems they could use this strategy on, but also how to use it. Next week we will continue to practice these basic facts, as well as “turn around” facts, and +9 facts! The children will soon be dreaming about their math facts.

Social Studies

We have begun to talk about history, artifacts, and the past. Using their social studies text books, we are practicing not only reading the text, but also reading the titles, subtitles, pictures and captions to gain information. The children are also practicing answering “right there,” questions. This can be a challenging skill! Given a question, our job was to identify an important “key word” in the question, and then skim the text to locate it. The answer was right there! This was a great connection to a test taking strategy we learned in one of our reading lessons this week. The children also discussed the passing of time, and reviewed how a time line functions- from left to right. Next week we will be talking about needs and wants, as we travel back in history to the very beginning of our town, Arlington Heights!

Jack Musich, an Arlington Heights artist, will be visiting the children on Friday morning. Each of the children will be connected to a landmark in our town, past or present. They will study it, and draw it with some tips from this amazing artist! The children will be recording a podcast with information about their landmark. An added challenge for the children will be to photograph themselves either with their landmark, or in the spot where it used to be. This is going to be such a fun unit!

Enjoy your weekend!