Hello!
We had another terrific week in 2-2!
Thank you to everyone for returning their permission slips for our upcoming field trip to the Arlington Heights Police Department, which will take place on November 6th. We look forward to a wonderful walk on a crisp fall day to learn firsthand about services in our community. This field trip will tie in perfectly with our next unit- Citizenship!
Thank you for returning the note we sent home letting us know if your child will be staying at school or going home for lunch the day of our Halloween celebration. This will help the office manage student attendance, help us prepare for lunch supervision, and allow those parents who returned the notes to avoid the traffic jam in the office on this festive day!
Report card season is approaching! Please let me know if you would like a 2nd copy of your child's report card due to special family circumstances. Thank you also for sending in your conference notes promptly. We will meet as a staff this week to schedule conferences that include any/all of the specialists your child sees at school. We also do our best to arrange conferences back-to-back with other siblings in the family.
Here are some highlights of our week!
1) The children learned new reading strategies to support them in their independent reading practice
2) We ran a series of collision trials during our motion unit in science.
3) We reviewed and took our Unit 2 math test- the kids did a great job!
4) We began a new writing unit: Letter writing!
5) We welcomed Paige's mom, Mrs. Otahal in for a visit to celebrate Paige's star student week.
6) We attended the 4th grade musical, what a terrific performance!
Our first reading strategy of the week revolved around nonfiction texts. We noticed that there are many features in nonfiction texts that help us process and understand the factual information. After our lesson, the children went on to read a nonfiction text of their own and were on a mission to find their own nonfiction text features! Below, Alexandra noticed one that we hadn't thought of: increasing the SIZE of the object and labeling it, so we could better see the smaller details!
Look at all of the post-it notes! Its so great to see the children making a note of the information that they want to remember. They are engaged, and focused, an really interacting with the text!
Tyler found an index in the back of his book! He noticed that he could easily flip to specific topics by page number using the index.
We took a moment for the children to share their findings with a neighbor. It's so much more engaging if all of the children share with a buddy, than if only one or two share with the whole class. I was so proud to see the children share the nonfiction features they found with each other!
Kelsey made numbered tabs and labeled 5 different nonfiction features with us! She found labels, captions, a glossary, a map, and an index! What a terrific listener and learner!
On to science! The children amazed me with how focused they were during our collision trials. One challenge was to find a way to make the "track" ball (the ball placed on the track) only move 10 centimeters or less after colliding with the "ramp" ball (the ball rolling down the ramp). Another challenge was to get the "track" ball to roll all the way across the ramp. The children thought carefully about how to achieve these goals. They experimented with the height of the ramp, and the size and material of each of the balls. (They had large and small cork, glass, and metal balls.)
The children took these trials very seriously and worked to make sure that everyone in their group had a turn and a chance to participate. We were all eager to see each group's demonstration. We noticed that there were several different combinations of variables that allowed the children to achieve these goals in different ways!
We were so happy to have a visit from Mrs. Otahal during Paige's star student week. They showed us a neat experiment that got us thinking about how water may affect color dye. Paige dropped a piece of cloth in two cups. She dropped the same number of drops of food coloring in each cup. Then she added different levels of water.
Mrs. Otahal shared with us one of Paige's favorite stories, "We're Going on a Bear Hunt." We loved listening to this oldie but goodie!
Then it was time to check the results of Paige's experiment. The children noticed that the cup that contained MORE water turned the cloth a lighter shade of red (on the left) than the cup that had LESS water (on the right.)
What a sweet, caring, and hardworking student Paige is! We are so lucky to have such a loving and lovable little girl in our class. What an amazing helper, too! You had a terrific week, Paige!
Here we are enjoying the 4th grade musical!
Another reading strategy of the week was to think carefully about the elements that are typically found in folktales. We read the story "Tony's Bread" by Tomie DePaola and found all of them! The children thought about fairy tales and folk tales that they know, and came up with many examples of "long long agos," cultural words and phrases, sets of 3, events of trickery, and happy endings.
Then the children went on to their independent work! They read fairy and folktales- some new, and some old, with a new purpose. The children again impressed me with all of the examples they found of these folktale elements!
After reading with a partner, again we shared our findings. The children love sharing their learning with their classmates, and they do a terrific job of listening to each other, too!
Our new writing unit is Letter Writing! We learned that the purpose of writing a letter is to communicate with someone else. Making sure to include the date, greeting, body, closing, and signature, the children practiced writing friendly letters this week! We carefully selected the "audience" of our letter. Then we thought about the purpose of our writing- either to persuade, inform, or entertain. We decided that if we ask a question or two, it would engage the reader of our letter and elicit a response! The children enjoyed writing a letter to and receiving a letter from a classmate this week.
Coming up in this unit, the children will practice various types of letter writing including: a business letter, a thank you note, and an invitation!
Thank you for following all of our learning in 2nd grade!
Enjoy the weekend!
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