Happy Monday and thank you for taking the time to read our classroom Blog :-). We have been busy, busy in Second Grade and it's actually kind of wild to stop and think about how fast our time is winding down. When you come back from Spring Break, and look at your second graders and feel like they look more like third graders, you know the time is coming... yikes!!
Readers' Workshop & Writers' Workshop
We are continuing to move along in our study of Non-Fiction texts in both Readers' and Writers' Workshop! Students have been crafting their own non-fiction books based on research they have been doing during Readers' Workshop. We have spent a great deal of time learning to pull information from texts and transfer the info to stickie notes in our own words. Then we have taken those stickie notes and transferred our facts into a text format. First we spent about 2.5 weeks writing "Question and Answer" style books where each child wrote on their own topic using classroom non-fiction texts and Internet based research on our ChromeBook Laptops. Then we moved into a 2 week study of "True and False" style texts as an alternative way to present non-fiction information. We applied skills from the Q and A books to our writing and presentation of the True and False books. Be sure to ask your child to tell you more about these projects- the have been so excited about writing lately and currently have their published books on display in our classroom for their classmates to read during Readers' Workshop Independent and Partner times!
Math Workshop
Next we moved into a whole weeks worth of lessons on Measurement. Students are familiar with the US Standard Measurement (inch, foot and yard) as well as the Metric System (centimeters and meters). They have been working with: rulers, tape measures, meter sticks/yard sticks to measure all sorts of distances and lengths in our classroom and on our bodies. Students have used a lot of estimation and predicting before doing real measurements. Table lengths, the door way measurement, length of our classroom, standing long jumps, arm spans, distances around our heads, lengths of our legs and more, have all been measured. Data has been collected and we have practiced making line plots and pictographs of this data.
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| That time we measured the room using the kids! |
We also began to take time to review 2-dimensional shapes (rectangles, triangles, squares, rhombus, parallelograms and quadrilaterals) have all been explored. We will be digging deeper with these shapes as well as 3-dimensional in the weeks ahead!
Language Workshop
In Language Workshop we have been exploring with two books, one about the life of Beatrix Potter (author of Peter Rabbit) and one about the life of a humpback whale named: Ibis. Each text has been unique as the story has appeared to look like fiction, yet was filled with true facts about the main character - Beatrix and Ibis. While our students are confident about what makes a book fiction and what makes a book non-fiction, it is always fun to stump them too, when a book appears to be a little bit of both. We took our wonderings from Language Workshop and sorted the books we had in our book tubs this week based on if they were: fiction, non-fiction or a little bit of both. We did a visable thinking activity with Ibis to dig deeper and talk about what might be fiction and what might be based on fact throughout the text. This was difficult yet, we had an awesome discussion about our thoughts and why as we pulled evidence from the text and our own prior knowledge. As this week has ended we attempted to name this genre of book and came to the conclusion that Informational Fiction fit perfect (and yes, that's the real name of this genre).
Science
Our Scientists continue to be busy exploring AIR! We have had some awesome weather lately - perfect for: collecting air with pinwheels and snake spinners, blowing bubbles and monitoring the windspeed, learning about different types of clouds, launching balloon rockets and creating our own parachutes!
Important Dates/Reminders
Monday, April 23 - ALL FIELD TRIP Money and Permission slips DUE for Troy Historical Society trip on Wednesday, May 2nd.
Friday, April 27 - Half Day of School - Teacher PD in the afternoon
Thursday, May 17 - School Wide Spring Clean-Up
Friday, May 18 - Field Day
