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| Here's a preview of our trip to the Outdoor Center - an awesome day to be a Weckie! Mrs. Weckstein is working hard on a video for next week looking back at our first field trip! :-) |
It has been a fantastic first full week back in second
grade! With the holidays behind us, we’ve moved on to new units, been reviewing
for the upcoming benchmark and even found some time to squeeze in some fun too!
Reader’s Workshop
This week in Workshop we shifted our focus onto punctuation
we see within text. We’ve taken a specific look at the: period, comma,
quotation mark, exclamation mark, question mark, hyphen, elipses and
apostrophe. We spent time creating a huge anchor chart about: how the
punctuation mark looks, what the job of the punctuation mark is and gave
examples of the punctuation mark used within text. Our Reader’s each created
their own smaller version of this anchor chart to keep in their Reader’s
Response Logs. This week I continued to do reading assessments and am happy to
say they are almost complete! Soon we will re-align reading groups,
partnerships and independent book choices based on the new data that I have
been collecting.
Writer’s Workshop
Our Writer’s began a new unit this week as we move into our
Narratives Unit. Students will be learning how to write personal narratives and
to zoom in further to write small moment narratives. This week we looked at
familiar texts like “Frog and Toad” and “Poppleton” to read sample narratives.
We also spent time in mini-lessons watching Mrs. Weckstein create “Watermelon
and Seed Ideas” for stories. The idea is that the watermelon represents a big
event (my examples included: a golf outing in Florida, our road trip out east
and a summer up at camp). Then we looked in to the watermelon and pulled out a
“seed” where each seed represents different things that happened in that big
event. These seeds will be the inspiration for our future small moments. Right
now our writers’ are simply collecting watermelon and seed ideas so that they
have several narrative ideas to choose from when we move into the drafting
phase of writing.
Making Meaning
This week we began a new unit in Making Meaning where we are taking a look at “Wonderings” we can
make about texts. We read two very different books, The Incredible Paintings
of Felix Clousseaux and The Ghost Eye Tree. Both provide excellent
examples of different stories with unknown themes where our kids can do awesome
wonderings about what might happen next or even after the story ends! We will
expand on our look into ‘wonderings’ next week in Reader’s Workshop.
Word Study
Word Study began this week by looking at contractions. This
was perfect timing with our Reader’s Workshop as we got an early preview of one
of the many jobs of an apostrophe. We practiced omitting letters and adding the
apostrophe in the place. Next we moved on to sound patterns in words. We made
connections between words with similar patterns. Last we took a look at consonant
digraphs (ex: ch, th, sh, etc.) and did a sort where we noticed differences
between these digraphs in the beginning and endings of words.
Social Studies
We also began a new unit in Social Studies this week! We
began our look into “Our Local Economy”. We focused on goods and services this
week and talked about the importance of each. We read the story If You Give
A Mouse A Cookie and upon the second reading, we played a game where we
identified the different goods (such as a cookie) and services (and pouring him
a glass of milk). We created a chart about different goods we use daily and the
services that provide these goods or are associated with these goods.
Science
This week we made observations on our garlic and our wheat.
We learned how seeds can travel.
Math Workshop
In Math Workshop this week we began the week looking at Data
and created a graph of our favorite foods sorted into their respective food
groups. We talked about the data and spent time looking for the minimum and
maximum! On Tuesday we spent time looking at mixed addition and subtraction
stories. Our Mathematicians have been taught different strategies to use to
solve these problems including: part-part-total diagrams, change to more
diagrams and comparison diagrams. We talked about how we might choose which
diagram would best fit the different number stories. As the week went on we
learned how to subtract with borrowing using base-10 blocks. This will continue
to be a new and at first tricky skill for our students. As the week ended we
spent time doing multiplication with equal group illustrations and also by
using arrays.
Please make sure to
review at home for our Math Benchmark, this Wednesday, January 16th!
Study Guide packets came home early in the week and do not need to be returned
to school.
Important Dates
-Thursday, January 17th
– End of the Second Marking Period-Thursday, January 17th – Rollerskating at the Rolladium, 6:30-8:30pm.. AND MRS. WECKSTEIN WILL BE THERE!!!!
-Friday, January 18 – Monday, January 21st – NO SCHOOL (Friday is a Staff Professional Development and Monday is Martin Luther King Jr.)
-Monday, January 21st – Martin Luther King Jr. Day Celebration at Walled Lake Northern, 5:00pm Dinner Starts, Speaker is at 6:30pm
