Friday, March 8th

Another 4 day week, but still much was accomplished.

Hope you’re enjoying the reading activities on the March is reading month calendar!

Thank you to families for participating in our fundraiser this week to help a teacher in our community.

Reader’s Workshop:

We continue with our Non-Fiction book studies.  This week we enjoyed a book by Cynthia Rylant, one of our favorite authors, called The Whales. The first day we read it for enjoyment and discussed the genre of the book.  Students recognized almost immediately the poetry elements of the book.  Next, they brought up that it was also full of information about whales.  As we reread this book throughout this week we pulled out the non-fiction parts and then discussed the fictional elements the author included.  Finally, students were given a copy of the text used to highlight the fiction and non-fiction parts of the story.   Independently students continue to shop for  an assortment of books that are just-right for them as well as books that are non-fiction.  During independent reading time they examine these books for elements of fiction and non-fiction.  Many students are becoming very confident in identifying features of both.

Our making meaning  Read-Aloud this week was It Could Still Be a Worm by Allen Fowler.  With this non-fiction text we made connections to previous knowledge on worms, came up with wonderings about worms and read the text for new information.  We also identified how this text was divided into sections such as where they live, what they looked like etc.

Writer’s Workshop:

It has been exciting to see students finishing their personal narratives and some moving on to write more.  We have spent a great deal of time discussing and practicing revision and editing.  Our goal this week was to have each child finish at least one personal narrative having gone through each stage of the writing process.  We will be publishing these pieces over the next weeks.  If there is a parent who would like to volunteer to type any of these, I would love the help.  Next week students will begin learning to write non-fiction pieces.

Math Workshop:

We have begun our measurement unit and students are learning about the importance of standard measurements and why/how measuring should be exact.  For 2^nd grade that means though we have demonstrated how an inch is broken into 16ths, we try to measure to the nearest ½ inch.  This is still difficult for some and we will continue working on it.  Students are also learning when to use which unit, such as using inches vs. yards.  For example we won’t be using inches to measure a school bus.  We’ve also moved into measuring perimeter and will soon begin area.

Word Study:

This week our students learned about adding suffixes (endings such as es or ed) to words ending in y.  During this lesson students really had to think about the root words to know if they changed the y to ies or ied, as not all words ended in y.  I noticed too that some are forgetting our lesson about doubling the consonant when adding ed when the word ends with a vowel and consonant, such as hop to hopped.  We also revisited ed endings and how they can sound differently at the end.  For instance the ed in hunted sounds like id and the ed with jumped sounds like t.

Social Studies:

We continue our study of our local economy.  We’re still looking at jobs and discussing producers, consumers and how they offer goods and services. 

Important Dates/Reminders:

April 11^th: Sock Hop!  Mark the date down  - We still need donations for our "Beach Day" basket ASAP!