Friday, October 26, 2012

Reading and Writing and Math Oh My!


It was great getting to talk to all of you at conferences!  We are lucky to have a class filled with caring, helpful students.  We have finished our first chapter on Weather.  The students learned about different types of weather and how the sun affects Earth.  We are switching to Social Studies for a few weeks and will continue Weather next month.  In Social Studies, we discussed our local government and focused on the rights and responsiblities of citizens.  The students came up with great examples of how they can be good citizens in their communities as well as in our classroom!    Next week we will be focusing on voting and do a mock vote in our classroom. 
In Reader's Workshop, we are finishing up our unit on making connections.  The students have been practicing making connections to various books through partner sharing, post-it notes and reading responses.  They also completed Venn diagrams to find similarities and differences between them and a character we read about.  We also started our new word sort this week.  You should have gotten the copy of their sorts at home with ideas for practicing them. 
In Writer's Workshop, the students have been working on personal narratives about a friend.  We discussed the importance of adding descriptive words in their writing and they practiced adding some to their stories.  We also wrote letters to Lauren Larson, a third grader who is battling cancer. 
In math, we started our Measurement unit.  The students have been practicing using a centimeter ruler to measure the sides of squares, rectangles, and triangles and also learned how to find the pertimieter.  We will take the Unit 2 test on Monday. 

Our Fall party is Wednesday the 31st at 1:30 for those who would like to attend!
Have a great weekend!

Mrs. Quinn

Wednesday, October 10, 2012

Working hard in 2nd Grade!

 
 
We have been very busy the past week!  This class is so helpful and caring towards their classmates and I love to see that!
In math we are continuing to practice solving and writing adddition and subtraction equations and story problems.  The students have also been taking weekly addition timed tests and have alreday been showing progress with their scores. 
In Reader's Workshop, we are focusing on making connections with fiction text.  Students are working on noticing when a book reminds them of something in their life or something they've read before.  They practiced using post-its to mark a spot in their book that they made a connection to.  This is a great strategy to practice at home as well!  As you may have noticed the October reading calendar is different from last month.  I thought this would be more challenging and fun for them.  If they complete 20 activities, they will have lunch in the classroom with me!
In Writer's Workshop the students have been busy writing personal narratives.  Some of the topics they have written about are something they like to do with their family, something scary or memorable that happened to them etc.  We have been practicing adding descriptive words to our stories as well. 
We started our Weather unit in science and did an experiment to see how the sun affects the temperature of water.  We also finished up our leaf observations. 
 
Lia
 
**Reminders**
The book fair starts today Oct 10th.  You can order on-line by going to the link below
 
 
Conferences start tomorrow Thursday Oct. 11th in the PM