Welcome back!

Dear families,

Happy New Year!
I wanted to touch base with everyone and let you know what we will be working on this and next week!

We are getting ready for another I-Ready reading and math assessment. I will give you the dates after I have confirmed our testing times. Please continue to have your child read daily. Also, be sure your child has headphones for taking the test in class.

In reading, we are continuing to work on reading non-fiction. We read the book Ivan the Shopping Mall Gorilla today. We compared the non-fiction book to the fiction chapter book The One and Only Ivan that we read in December. We will write about the book tomorrow. Next week, we will work on reading books to grow our knowledge across more than one book. We will compare information, notice parts of books that go together, retell information, add pieces of information from multiple sources to help us become experts.

Today we wrote news reports about our Winter Breaks! The students enjoyed sharing all the special times they had over the break, celebrating and having fun with family and friends!
We will work on writing goals for the new year and talk about different ways that people celebrate the coming of a new year!

Next week, we will begin the next part of non-fiction writing. We will be writing Non-Fiction Teaching books (or All Abouts). Students will read non-fiction books in class to help them prepare writing. I will begin showing them how to add science to their reports as well as other features of non-fiction.

This week students began working on handwriting using the Zaner-Bloser style of printing. Each child has a packet that will be kept at school. Our goal is to work a few times a week for about 15 minutes on specific letters. We discussed writing letters that are tall or short, and how capitals touch the top and the bottom of the lines when we write. This will be helpful next year when cursive handwriting is introduced.

We will begin using a word study notebook next week. Second graders continue to work on vowel teams. Our focus for the week will be on ways to make the long u sounds in words such as: cruise, food, mule. The books will be kept at school, they will not be coming home. I will teach the rule for the vowel team. The students will do the sort in their word study books and we will write words that have those vowel teams (ui, oo and u_e) in class next week.

In math, we are about half way through unit 4 on place value. We will work today on an open response to a math problem. Students will use base ten blocks to show a number with ones, tens and hundreds place. Next week we will be learning how to play the game "Target," learn how measure using the foot, inch and centimeter. Students will begin to use and understand how to make an array.

In Science, we have wrapped up our kits! We will continue to discuss weather and record the temperature.

We will start on a new social studies unit next week on the History of Our Community.

Have a good (short) week!
Mrs. Scheck