2nd Grade Stars!

From the desk of Mrs. Schmidt...

What a week!  It was so fun to see the excitement and energy in the 2^nd Grade Musical!  The children did a fantastic job of singing and dancing, really showing how much music means to them!  There was much anticipation for our walking field trip to the Arlington Heights Police Department too!  We lucked out with the weather and had a great time learning about our local government in action! 

We read a nonfiction article called, “A Trip to the Emergency Room,” this week.  The children were able to make many real-world connections, as they shared their own experiences with the emergency room.  Our focus was on sequencing again this week to understand order in what we read.  We became reading detectives as we looked for transition words, such as first, next, then, after, last, etc.  We talked about the importance of these words to signal a change in what we are reading.  In our guided reading groups, we discussed the nonfiction topics of why leaves change color and how pumpkins are grown.   In these groups, we explored the author’s purpose for writing and used an acronym of PIE to help us distinguish the reasons.  P is to persuade the reader to their opinion, I is to inform the reader about a topic, and E is to entertain the reader.  There was a lot of content-specific vocabulary, so we discussed strategies of how to pronounce these words as well as how to use the context to decipher their meanings.  As an extension, we learned about prepositions such as in, out, under, above, etc. and looked at how these can change the meaning of a sentence.

In math, we practiced with some “timely” topics as we told and wrote times on a clock.  We also calculated coin combinations and exchanged coins and dollar bills.  Comparing and ordering numbers is an important skill to demonstrate our understanding of place value with numbers.  After collecting data, we put that information into a tally chart.  Then we displayed it in a bar graph to find the maximum, minimum, and median.

At the LMC this week, we started our research of U.S. Presidents as part of our Citizenship Unit.  Mrs. O’Kelly assigned us a president to research and then we were able to choose another president in our search.  Using PebbleGo.org, we looked at the lives of these presidents.  In our research, we are looking at certain criteria to persuade others that our president should be nominated to be a part of Mt. Rushmore.   For our criteria, we are looking at what kind of contributions these presidents have made to our country.  This will be an ongoing project in the next two weeks in the LMC.

Up & Coming

 *Wednesday, October 29^th-Arlington Heights Memorial Library Book Mobile will be here.  See the letter on Monday about this visit.

*Wednesday, October 29^th-Mrs. Neumann comes in for Art Appreciation.

*Friday, October 31^st-Halloween Parade & Party in the afternoon.  If your child will be home lunch, please send in a NOTE for this day.  Also, please make sure that they are back on time after lunch, so that we can get ready for the parade.  Thanks!!!