Week 3

Dear Parents,

    Another smooth week of learning went by! I am really impressed with your children. They are building up their work stamina and already following our classroom routines. They realize that we all make  a mistake we just try harder or fix it! ( including Ms. Carpenter) 😊

     In math this week we continued on with learning our math routines. Among these we are practicing time to the hour and counting money. Please help with these activities by practicing at home. Recognizing the coins and their values is an important TEK in second grade. Then they must add up all the values to find a total number of coins. This takes A LOT of practice for some second graders. We continued to problem solve if there were enough items for a class. ( 20 students, 24 pencils- yes, there were enough and 4 extra!) We had to prove our answers by creating a drawing.

      In reading we were continuing to learn about how to decide the central idea of a story. We made sure we could find details to support this idea. We also began practicing the skill of inferencing. Knowing that we can get information from the words, the pictures, and what we know about the world around us helps us make these educated guesses.

      In writing we have been challenged to look at craft moves that authors and illustrators use and incorporate them into our writing and illustrating. We will continue this next week as well.

       We had our first spell check today. This cannot be retaken if the grade is under 70%. It is important that your child practice his/her sort and spelling of his/her words all week and be ready for the spell check on Friday. This will be two grades. The list of words is counted and then the two sentences is a separate grade. The sentences show if your child is learning to spell basic sight words as well as their list of words and then transfer the correct spelling into their writing.

         In science we finished up our unit 1 and took an assessment. We began unit 2 on the properties of matter. We observed four sets of items, worked as groups and recorded our observations in our science notebooks.