Mrs. Batten's Second Grade: February 2019

Dear Families,
I hope everyone is having a healthy, relaxful vacation. I thought I would update you on all the happens right before break:

Our Winter Birds Bulletin Board

Writing Workshop: We had so much fun publishing our Informational Chapter Books. The students were so proud of all their hard work! We learned alot about the many text features of informational books. Our books were complete with a table of contents, an introduction, three chapters with facts and real photographs, a conclusion, and a glossary.

Reading Workshop: I just finished assessing each child's reading level and it was wonderful to see all their growth. This month we have been working on comprehension strategies: making connections, predicting, inferencing, summarizing, and finding the main idea of a text. Recently, we also learned how to use a dictionary to look up our spelling words.

Science: We just completed a unit called "Magic Materials." In this unit we explored different material's properties, purpose and function.

We created structures out of index cards.
We tried to see if we could change paper's properties in order to make the paper "strong" enough to hold large books.

We also tried to create strong, stable structures.

We tested the properties of various candies to see if they were "meltable".

We tested the properties of various materials and tried to create a hat that would best shade us from the sun.

Special Events:

We celebrated the 100th day of school by creating towers with 50 marshmallows and 50 toothpicks. We also used a fun app which made us look 100 years old!