Hello! I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving holiday with your families. My family enjoyed seeing out of town relatives, watching football, eating and playing some glow golf!
We are already well into the month of December and we have been so busy with lots of fun and learning in our classroom!
In reading workshop we are continuing to work on reading non-fiction. This past week we read non-fiction books and looked for features such as: a glossary, index and bold words. We used the book Tigers for practice using an entire page to figure out a meaning of a word. Students looked at vocabulary words and found ideas that were similar to those words to share in reading workshop. Today we practiced reading our non-fiction books and sounding like an expert.
This week we began writing informational or non-fiction books. Students brainstormed topics they know a lot about and began writing books on them. We started with putting together a table of contents and writing introductions. We used a writing check lists to begin seeing if second graders are able to include the key parts of a non-fiction book. We will continue to work on non-fiction books until the end of the month. Next we will put a "how to" page into our books and add a glossary at the end picking 2-3 words that we want to teach our readers.
In Phonics, we worked on noticing word patterns in rhyming books. We made lists of words with the same pattern (ack, ill, ight, etc). We used our lists to write rhyming books and today we are sharing our books with Mrs. Megyesi's kindergarten class. Look for pictures on twitter!
We started unit 4 in math, a family letter came home on Monday. Keep the family letter to refer to when your child is working on home links. This unit is all about measurement. We began with telling time on analog clocks to the five minute mark. This skill is developing for many students, practice at home on the paper clock to help your child. We will work next week on place value using base ten blocks to represent numbers and to compare numbers.
We are nearing the end of our science unit this month. We will still record the weather in our science journals. We have worked with tools to learn about measuring the weather using an anemometer, a thermometer, a rain gauge, and a weather vane. We made pin wheels and whirligigs to show how wind moves outside. We studied these types of clouds: cumulus, nimbus, cirrus and stratus. We made a poster and used cotton balls to show the types of clouds and how they look. We read about the changing seasons and learned how the northern hemisphere is tipped away from the sun in winter. This causes the nights to be longer and for us to have less daylight! We discussed where the equator is and how it stays warm year round in countries near it. Next we will make a paper kite and hopefully get outside to try our kites next week!
We are getting ready for our field trip on December 19th. I have the necessary amount of chaperones signed up to go! On that day we will be both outside and inside, students and parents please bring warm clothes for being outside. The experiments we will be doing will show how animals survive in winter. Students will need a sack lunch that day. We will return to school around 1:30 p.m.
Next week is parent teacher conferences! The students have a half day and are dismissed at 11:25 p.m. Parents will meet with me and get their child's first report card for the year. I look forward to seeing you on Dec. 12th!
Have a great weekend,
Mrs. Scheck
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