The View from 2-2: Hello, Winter!

It's hard to believe that winter break is right around the corner. Please continue encouraging your children to dress for the weather! Warm coats and hats on cold days make the children more comfortable outdoors. Our PE days are Tuesday and Thursday, so gym shoes are important on those days for the children to be able to participate in activities that involve gym activities! Also, please remember to keep a spare mask (or two) in your child's backpack! Read on to learn about the things that have been keeping us busy and learning in 2nd grade!

Reading:

We are enjoying our new focus on nonfiction texts. The children are learning to recognize that nonfiction texts can have a variety of text structures! When we recognize the text structure, it helps us to better process and understand the text.

We read a book this week full of facts about turtles. We recognized the main idea/detail and compare/contrast text structures within this text. Then we read a book about the life of Christopher Columbus. We noticed that this book was written in sequential order, making it a chronological text. It also fit into the cause/effect category, as Christopher Columbus searched for a way to make his journey to the New World.

Last, we read a book about a talented athlete, Althea Gibson, who made her way through racial discrimination to make a name for herself in the tennis world. We noticed that books use a large range of interesting and "juicy" words, ready for us to investigate! We learned that these new challenging words can be "solved" with the help of our background knowledge, context clues, or possibly a glossary (if available). The children are excited to use this new information they are learning to dive deeply into the world of nonfiction reading!

Math:

As I mentioned, Chapter 5- an introduction to multiplication- was very brief! It was only one in-depth lesson. We jumped right into Chapter 6, which focuses on multiplying by 2, 5, and 10. The children are enjoying adding in sets and building the foundation of their multiplication facts! We will be reviewing our multiplication skills and wrapping up this chapter next week!

Writing:

In writing, we have been working to "tell more." We are adding interesting details that help the reader to better visualize what we are writing about. The children wrote a piece explaining something they like or something they dislike. After editing their work and offering peer feedback, the children were encouraged to share their writing with the class from the author's chair!

Grammar:

The children have been working to identify and write complete sentences. We look to make sure that our sentences get a "High Five" which means: begins with a capital letter, ends with a period, has a subject ("who") and a predicate ("what happens") and it needs to make sense. If we noticed an incomplete sentence, we found a way to make it into a complete sentence!

We also worked to combine two simple sentences into a COMPOUND sentence using a comma and a conjunction (connecting word!)

SEL:

We talk for a few minutes every morning about how to get our day off to a good start. This includes how to be a good friend, have a positive mindset, believe in ourselves, etc. We spent some time reviewing our class charter that the kids helped me to create! The children are also excited to have their very own "mood meter" attached to their desks. It is so helpful to be mindful of how we are feeling throughout the day.

Social Studies:

We have been discussing the 3 types of communities: rural, urban, and suburban. This week we read a book called The Little House, which got us thinking about what kind of house we would like to live in and why, and where we would like for it to be located. The children wrote and illustrated their answer, sharing both their thinking and understanding. We thought about what we love about the community we live in, Arlington Heights! The children will be deciding what type of community they would like their house to be in. Coming up, we are going to be learning more about maps!

LMC:

We practiced coding using Bee Bots!

We also read the book Magic Ramen by Andrea Wang. It was an added bonus to meet with her via Zoom from our classroom this week! We were inspired by her and we are newly motivated to "keep trying!" when things get hard.

SNOW DAY!

The children noticed there is a Zoom link in their Seesaw accounts just in case of a snow day during the winter. We practiced logging in, and we thought about all of the fun things we like to do on a snowy day! We read snowy books, wrote about our favorite winter past-times, and then the children made the adorable snow people below!

Greg Tang Live Zoom

The children were so excited to meet Greg Tang today! He is a mathematician who is an expert at teaching and reinforcing math concepts. Feel free to visit https://tangmath.com/ to play a variety of math games that build upon the skills we are working on in class. Today, Greg Tang reviewed subtracting using number bonds to help us use mental math strategies in order to eliminate counting on our fingers. They were so excited to learn with him today! There is another live opportunity with Greg Tang coming up this week on Thursday morning. We will be practicing our math skills while playing Jeopardy!