Wednesday, January 27, 2010

Photos of our first two Mystery Readers...

Tuesday, January 26, 2010

Another Tuesday in class 2D! Today is the 90th day of school! Can you believe we are half way through the year? We had a great day today with only one, yes, one marble remaining in our 100 marble bowl. When we have 100 marbles transferred to our marble jar, we can celebrate our good behavior with a day of special events such as a "Read In," a movie and popcorn, "Game Day," etc. Hopefully we will score our final marble early in the day tomorrow.

We have a new Star of the Week this week: Keshav! Congratulations, Star!

Mrs. Glimcher surprised us as a Mystery Reader today. Her book selection was Enemy Pie, a book about friendship.

We also finished up chapter 7 in math today. There is quite a bit of vocabulary to be familiar with when studying 2D shapes, so the 2D Rocks have been working on a small book of terms to use as a reference at home. The books came home today for students to share with you.

This afternoon the 2D Rocks decorated placemats for tomorrow's faculty appreciation luncheon and played, "Run for the Roses" a game of categorizing.

We are nearing the end of our Maps and Globes book. Reviews of the topics covered in the book will take place over the next couple of weeks. A variety of assessments will help determine which topics the students understand and which topics may need to be revisited in class.

Cursive continues!

Our immigration unit is coming to an end. We read The Butterfly Seeds this week, a story loosely based on the author's grandparents own immigration story. We are beginning to work on a presentation of our family trees as a culminating activity for this unit.

Biographies will begin soon.

Tuesday, January 19

Star of the Week! Mark's hero is his father. He really enjoyed a trip his family took to Italy. They rode on a gondola and a water taxi. One of his favorite books is Stink and the Great Guinea Pig Express. Congratulations, Star!

Today we watched a video called My Friend, Martin. The Second Graders really enjoyed this cartoon about the Civil Rights Movement and the life of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

We read, The Story of the Statue of Liberty, and discussed the importance of this symbol of freedom.

Tuesday, January 12, 2010

Today was a busy day..per usual. New spelling lists went home today. Some sorts were quite a challenge this week! The 2D Rocks moved from suffixes to compound words during our grammar study today. Coming up with compound words from a fixed list of words proved to be another challenge this morning. No breezing through Second Grade in January! We partner read our Open Court story, A Place Called Freedom, about a family of freed slaves. The Rocks enjoyed our 3-special day: P.E., Computer, and Science. In the afternoon, we discussed vertices, sides, plane shapes, solids, congruency, and symmetry. We also continued our discussion of good manners and self-control.

Wednesday, January 6, 2010

Today we continued our focus on grammar by concentrating on common and proper nouns through categorizing. We also worked on the suffixes -less and -ful. The 2D Rocks really enjoyed our activities related to these topics. In math the class flew through ordinal numbers and practiced reading word problems carefully. We also looked at patterns within numbers and by using a hundreds chart, discussed how skip counting is really MULTIPLICATION! We are nearing the end of our manuscript unit in handwriting. Just 2 more pages until cursive!

Tuesday, January 5, 2010

The new year is off to a great start in class 2D! We have enjoyed being back together, listening to each others' stories, playing games, creating art together. Today we partner read our Open Court Story, NEW HOPE. This is the first story in our Immigration unit. We are also finishing up our last few pages of manuscript handwriting practice in order to move forward into cursive. Next week we will begin reading MUGGIE MAGGIE, a book about a second grader who is nervous to learn cursive handwriting. Luckily, the 2D Rocks are full of excitement and have much less anxiety about cursive than our friend, Maggie! We are finishing up our place value chapters in math and getting ready to move into 2D and 3D shapes this week. Onward to Wednesday!

Don't forget to send in mittens, hats, etc. We may be outside sooner than later...