Week 3

 Dear Parents,

       In math this week we focused on Base Ten Relationships to 120. We started Money Monday. This is our practice on counting money. Please start counting coins with your children. We always start with the coin with the largest value and go to the coins that have the smallest value. If a quarter, three pennies, a dime and two nickels were on a desk, we would line them up in this order: 1 quarter, 1dime, 2 nickels, 3 pennies. We would count up underneath the coins by adding the next amount to each coin. Example 25, 35, 40, 45, 46, 47, 48. Those coins equal 48 cents. This skill takes time to master for some students and your help is appreciated. We also started Time Tuesday. On this day we practice reading time. Right now we are only doing time to the hour and the half hour. We also kept practicing writing our numbers in standard form, model, expanded form and word form. I am so proud of my second graders!

       In writing we focused on finishing our beginning, middle and end three sentence writing. We began our first book using authors as mentors. We looked at books written by David Shannon, Mo Willems, Lois Ehlert, and Steven Kellogg. We are very excited about our books.

      In reading we learned about setting as time and place and connected it to why the setting is important to the story. We read Clark the Shark and took a comprehension check. We read a scholastic News about manners. We began a Manner’s Poster. We learned about internal and external traits of characters.. We read Violet the Piolet and talked about her character traits. We filled out a graphic organizer with the story details: characters, title, author, setting, beginning, middle and end.

        In science we learned about what engineers do and why they do them. We talked about the difference between a scientist and an engineer. We practiced our science vocabulary cards and took our unit checkpoint. We set up our second unit in our science notebooks. We also took a BOY science assessment to see what your child remembers from first grade.

        We went to the Library on Thursday. This will be our weekly day to go. Please have Library books back in your child’s backpack each Thursday so they can check out new books.

          I will give your child 3 new books on his/ her level on Tuesday. On holidays your child will not need to fill out the reading log. Our beginning of year testing should conclude by the end of next week. We then will begin reading Groups the following weeks. Books will not come home until after we have read them in group and had lessons over decoding the words. I will leave three books in the bookbag at all times. These should be used for the reading logs for children reading books that are levels 12 or 18. This will reinforce our group lessons and ensure their progress in reading. The level on the books is usually on the back of the book in the top corner. Students reading leveled books 28 or 30 can choose a book from home or read the books I provide. Lease make sure these book bags stay in your child’s backpack. They will bring them back to school every day.