Week of December 4-8

Hello families,

This week in second grade we have begun a new non-fiction reading and writing unit. We read the book Tuesday Tucks Me In. It is the memoir of a disabled veteran and his service dog named Tuesday. We learned how service dogs help people with disabilities. We also read an article and learned even more about how dogs are trained as rescue dogs and how other animals help people as well.
Today we shared our realistic fiction stories with Kindergartners. The students were so happy to show off their writing!
We have started a new unit of non-fiction writing this week. We did a class experiment with a car on a ramp. We learned how to write lab reports. We started with asking a question, then we wrote a hypothesis, next we wrote step by step procedures and last we wrote a conclusion.
We will practice this type of writing and begin to explore other types of non-fiction writing in the next few weeks.
In math, we have reached the end of unit 3. We had our unit 3 math test today. This unit was all about strategies for subtraction, fact families and rules for subtraction.
We will begin math unit 4 on Monday. A family letter will be sent home detailing what students will be learning.
In science, we have worked on learning more about air and how it moves things. We began learning about weather and the changing seasons. We made pinwheels on Thursday and tested them in the wind. As a class we made an anometer to measure the wind, we read about weather balloons. We put a rain gauge outside to measure precipitation over the several days.
We will wrap up this unit on science next week.
Parent teacher conferences are next week on Thursday, December 14th. It is also a half day for students. Students will be dismissed at 11:10 a.m.
Please remember to send mittens and a hat with your child! It is cold outside. Sending an extra pair of mittens is a good idea. Sometimes mittens get wet at recess and then they go outside again for block recess.
Have a great weekend,
Mrs. Scheck