Anyway...we are working and learning hard!
Reminders and things to know about
It's cold and students should bring coats every day. Students run around a lot and get thirsty, and should also bring a water bottle every day.
Jump Rope for Heart assembly this Friday at 3:00. Students will be getting excited to raise money for this charity, and to earn small prizes for various amounts of money raised.
Valentine's Day: Ms. Black has requested, and I concur, that we do NOT have Valentine's Day parties this year, in an effort to stay focused on learning and making up for all of those lost days. We have finally settled back into our routine, and we have much to do! On that Tuesday, students MAY bring Valentines (if they choose to bring them, they must bring one for each person in class--we have 27 children total) if they would like. Students will have about twenty minutes at the end of the day to deliver and enjoy them. We will do some writing about Valentine's Day, as well as some reading about the history of the holiday. Thank you for your understanding.
Report cards are scheduled to be sent home on Tuesday, February 7.
Upcoming week
Language Arts
Spelling: spelling patterns for /oy/ sound: oi and oy; suffixes are added onto the end of words that can change meaning or part of speech.
Writing: study of a small moment using mentor text Owl Moon. Brainstorming and zeroing in on small moments for our writing.
Reading: character analysis. What a character SAYS and DOES tells us about who they are. Sometimes actions speak louder than words. We are reading fables, folk tales, and proverbs. What are some wise sayings in your house? What do the stories of your community, culture, or religion tell us is important about it? What is the moral of the story?
Math
Subtraction with regrouping! We are spending some more time on this very important concept to be sure everyone understands HOW it works and what it means. When we were in school, it was called "borrowing," but we generally use the term "regrouping," as we are moving a group of tens over to the ones and breaking it up into ones.
Here is the routine we go through to solve a problem, including how we use the manipulatives:
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| We want to subtract 47 - 29, so we make the number 47. There are four tens and seven ones. |
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| We cannot subtract the 9 from the 7, so we start regrouping, by sliding a ten over into the ones. |
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| We then break that ten up into ones, so we can subtract the 9. |
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| We are finally able to subtract, and take away 9 ones (start in the ones place). |
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| And then we finally get to subtract 2 tens, leaving us with 18! |
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| We make sure our ones are in the ones place and tens in tens place. Being neat and organized is an important part of being a mathematician. |
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| We ask ourselves "do we need to regroup?" We determine yes or no, by looking in the ones place, and if the top number is less than the bottom number, then yes, we do. |
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| We regroup by taking one ten and moving it from the tens place to the ones place. |
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| We write our new numbers neatly, and the 17 shows we added the ten we moved onto the ones. |
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| Now we can finally subtract, by starting in the ones place and subtracting. |
Content area studies (Social Studies)
This unit, we are learning more about our responsibilities towards each other as members of communities.
Week in review
Language Arts
Spelling: We finally got through all of Sitton unit 7 words. Please click here for the word list and details of spelling patterns.
Writing: Students worked through a quick writing process to create personal narratives about losing a tooth. Their writing will be coming home in their Progress Portfolios in the month of February.
Reading: Fables: short stories, usually with animals, that teach a lesson called a moral. Aesop was a wise Greek slave who wrote many famous fables.
We started a whole new unit, learning more about communities, how people help and are kind to each other, and what the literature of a community tells us about what is important to the people.
Math
We started a new unit all about subtraction! We've been using a lot of manipulatives to visualize what actually happens when we regroup, as well as practicing over and over and over the routine (see above for the steps we use, if you would find them helpful at home).
Content area studies (Social Studies)
Communities, social responsibilities, kindness, jobs in the community.
Done with DRAs party! Second graders (just by the skin of our teeth, some days) helped me finish with my reading assessments, and we celebrated by adding a few games to our activity time as well as some "treats" (cucumbers, carrots with ranch, pineapple, watermelon, and muffins).
