Happy St. Patrick's Day

Second Graders have been very excited to get ready for St. Patrick's Day.  We drew leprechauns, read books, and created traps in hopes of catching one of these wee little folks!

St. Patrick's Day Craft

Designing Traps out of Recycled Materials!

Mathematics- This week in math we began unit 5.  We are working on 3D shapes, subtraction, and counting coins.  We worked on sorting and counting our change for the Big Change Round Up.  Our class raised almost $300!  Wow!

Working with larger numbers: Do we have 1,000 Linker Cubes? 

In Reading Workshop, students began reading series books.  We have been talking about how characters change and develop.  Students are working with a partner to become an expert on one series.  We also have been working on parts of speech: nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.

Playing an ipad game- Sorting verbs and adjectives

We watched short episodes of Lego City and discussed this series.  How do we expect the characters to act?  What is the same throughout the series?  How do characters change?

In Writing Workshop, we began opinion writing.  In second grade, we focus on writing reviews.  This week we wrote our opinion of Reflex, an online math game.  We are learning the basic parts of a review: lead, background, reasons, evidence, and ending.

Reminder- This Thursday and Friday are half days.  School ends at 11:30.  Thursday afternoon, we will have Parent Teacher Conferences.

Happy Vacation

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!

The Valentine Card Exchange

Our Marble Jar Celebration:  Hot Chocolate Dance Party!

Lastly, we have been working a lot on teamwork, cooperation, and being a good sport!  What an awesome class!

Reminder: March 21st & 22nd are now both 1/2 days!