What a fun and busy last few weeks we have had... From our field trip to the Troy Historic Village, to a Naturalist bringing in live birds, to Spring Clean Up and Field Day, we have been having FUN. Thank you for all of your help in making sure your child has been prepared and ready. It sure has helped that we have had FANTASTIC weather on these special days.
Readers' and Writers' Workshop
Our workshops have gone hand in hand for the last month or so as we dug deeper into our non-fiction studies. In Readers' Workshop we focused on learning how to pull facts about our birds from texts and then in Writers' we took our research and created paragraphs about our findings: physical description, habitat and nesting, food and eating habits, interesting facts and labeled diagrams of our Michigan birds have all been covered. Please be sure to look for our awesome bird report articles up in the hallway of our classroom. Our kids spent a great deal of time becoming experts about our Michigan birds and learning how to write an informational article about their bird!
We celebrated all of our hard work about birds with a Naturalist visit from the Leslie Nature Center. The kids absolutely LOVED seeing a live: red tailed hawk, kestrel and barred owl! I heard so many comments after about how neat it was to see the animals we had been learning about live and to watch how they interacted with the trainer and even us! You'll see pictures at the end of the blog.
Math Workshop
In math we have spent a lot of time lately with shapes. We have been learning about 2-dimensional shapes like: square, triangle, rhombus, circle, parallelogram, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon and octagon. Then we moved into 3-dimensional shapes and learned about the: sphere, cube, cylinder, cone, rectangular pyramid, rectangular prism, triangular pyramid and square pyramid. These are all shapes our students must be familiar with to continue to grow in third grade math! Then we spent time looking at rectangles, and how we could partition them equally with one inch squares and unifix cubes. This was helping to teach our students how to find the area of a shape while also warming them up for making arrays for multiplication which we moved onto finally! Please remember this is the very early stages of multiplying and this part can be tricky for our second graders. Unit 7 tests will be coming home either today or Monday and we actually just completed the Unit 8 test as this was a shorter unit on geometry and arrays!
Building 3-dimensional shapes in Math:
Social Studies
We are well on our way with our next Social Studies Unit - our Local Economy. This unit will help our students to understand what the local economy includes (businesses which either provide goods, services or both). They will be learning about being producers and consumers and the roles behind each. Additionally we will have a Market Day, similar to first grade, coming up on Friday, June 1st. More info will come home soon explaining this fun experiential day for our students!
iReady Update
We have just completed the Reading iReady Assessment and end of the year info will be coming home with your child soon. The results were very interesting - obviously the test continues to get harder but our students are now able to read more and do more deeper comprehension as well as have a better set of vocabulary by May. Most students improved and many by leaps and bounds (yay!). Some students who were already in the "on range" category grew some or actually decreased, only because the intensity of the test also increased. You will see when it all comes home. We are nearly done with the math portion as well - there are still a handful of kiddos who will be finishing that up next week!
Have a fantastic weekend - thanks to all who sent in gifts for Teacher Appreciation Week - that was so kind, touching and generous of you! I absolutely love what I do and love being alongside your kiddos for the journey. It's hard to believe how fast our time is going and to think we are nearly to Memorial Day Weekend! :-) Mrs. Weckstein
A snapshot of our Field Trip to the Troy Historic Museum...
Two of our classmates were recognized at the WLCSD Board Meeting for May for their great art work!
A glimpse into our In School Field Trip Bird Experience:
Then we had our big school Sing Along for "Send it On":
And then we cleaned up the Unity Garden Courtyard between 2nd and 1st Grade:
Oh, but wait! Then we had Field Day :-)...
