It's hard to believe that we have been in school for 5 weeks already! It is true when they say that time flies when you're having fun :-) In math this week we focused on developing addition strategies to help students master basic math facts. Students wrote addition stories (word problems) and practiced "counting on" using an open number line. An open number line is similar to a traditional number line however it's numbers are not labeled. This will help students to visualize number lines as we move on to solving more complicated problems. Today we worked with another addition strategy: doubles plus 1 and doubles plus 2. We used what we know about doubles (4+4, 6+6) to help us solve other addition problems. We will continue to develop these strategies next week. We read "Fighting the Fire" in literacy this week and discussed how nonfiction articles can be broken into main ideas and details. Students worked collaboratively to complete graphic organizers showing the main idea of "Fighting the Fire" and provided details from the text to support it. This week we also discussed parts of sentences: subject and predicate. Students used white boards to identify the subjects of sentences that were written on the board. The concept of predicates was a little more challenging for some to understand and we will continue to work on it next week.
Reminders/Announcements:
Have a great weekend!
~ Mrs. D
0 Comments
It has been another great week in second grade! This week we finished our first math unit on reviewing number and time concepts. Today we took our first math test and I am proud to announce that the class did FANTASTIC! The average score for the class was 90%! I want to thank parents for reviewing the practice test at home with their children :-) We achieve the best results for our students when we work together! Next week, we will continue to review some concepts of time and money as we shift our main focus to addition and subtraction strategies. In literacy this week, we read "Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea" by Cynthia Rylant. While reading we focused on story structure: beginning, middle, and end. We began working in reading groups this week and students worked cooperatively to create beginning, middle, and end posters for their texts. Students also started working on Fall activity centers this week. They played Halloween phonics Bingo, Guess the Scarecrow, and read books about Johnny Appleseed. Our class had a visit this week from Captain R (aka: Mrs. Dempsey)! Captain R led the class in a lesson on r-controlled vowels (Arrr Matey!) in celebration of International Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19th.
Reading-Rewards: Don't forget to continue logging your reading on Reading-Rewards.com! As a class we are up to 1,648 minutes!! Our Reader of the Week this week was Shamus who read an amazing 84 minutes! I love seeing the variety of books everyone is reading. It seems like soon some students will have enough RR miles saved up to start purchasing class rewards! Keep up the good work everyone! (If for some reason you cannot access the site, then write down what you read, bring it in, and we will log it at school) Reminders:
Have a great weekend! ~Mrs. D
We've had a great week in second grade! We are continuing to review number and time concepts in math. This week we worked with two-digit numbers and focused on the concepts of greater/less than and odd/even. Students created "super sorter machines" and sorted numbered balls as they traveled through the "pipes". We began working with our literacy program this week (Treasures). Students read the story "David's New Friends" about a boy who nervously starts school but ends up making an unlikely friend with the class pet lizard. We discussed character and setting and students worked on answering comprehension questions. A skill we are going to focus on and develop this year is restating the question in our answer.
Reminders:
Exciting News!
I am pleased to announce that Ms. Kristen Vocatura will be my long-term substitute while I am out on maternity leave. Ms. Vocatura is a familiar face in the building. She has been a substitute here in the past and last year completed her student teaching in Mrs. Owen's second grade class. Please help me welcome her to our classroom at next week's Open House! Have a wonderful weekend! ~Mrs. D We had a great week in second grade! Students worked hard as we took some beginning of the year benchmark assessments in literacy and math. The results of these assessments will be used to help focus classroom instruction to ensure success for all students. In literacy this week, we continued to work on our Folktales and Fairy Tales unit and created finger puppets to help us retell the story of Henny Penny. Students also worked on creating sponge paint portraits of Henny Penny, both of which will be added to our literacy "pockets". This week we also read the story Chrysanthemum, by Kevin Henkes. In the story a small mouse named Chrysanthemum goes to school for the first time and the other students teased her for being named after a flower. After reading the story students created "word graphs" by choosing four words from the text and graphing how many times the word appeared throughout the book. Students also wrote about their own names and what names they would choose for themselves if they were given the opportunity to. We began working in literacy centers this week. Our most exciting and interesting center involved students working in teams using alphabet pasta to spell our weekly spelling words. They made a slight mess but had fun in the process! In math this week we began working with two-digit numbers and place value. Students explored the concept of tens and ones as we worked with manipulatives on the overhead. This week in science we focused on the structure of plants and learned some facts about seeds and plants during our "Plant Scavenger Hunt". 18 fact cards were hidden throughout the classroom. Students worked with partners to find the facts and use them to answer plant questions. Their answers to these questions will become their notes to study from when we have our first science test in a few weeks. This afternoon I had a meeting to attend and we were unable to have our weekly spelling test. This just means that students get an extra two days to practice our spelling words. Be prepared for a spelling test first thing Monday morning! Our Reading-Rewards logs are up and running and together we read a total of 743 minutes this week! I am in the process of adding parent emails to our account. If you wish to be notified when your child logs their reading please email me and I will add you to the list. Hope you all have a great weekend! ~Mrs. D |
AuthorMrs. Dempsey Archives
May 2013
Categories |