Happy Thanksgiving!

It has been a wonderful week in 2nd grade! Everyone made it through the one FULL week of school in November! Remember that, next week, we will only have school on Monday and Tuesday.

In math, we continue our unit on place value. Students have done an excellent job working with larger numbers! We continue to practice representing numbers with boxes, sticks, and circles. We have practiced some more challenging story problems, as well as several activites on estimation! We are beginning to incorporate some short time practice activities into our daily routine. Please continue to discuss minutes before and after the hour at home.

It has been fun getting into our Social Studies books this week! As a morning activity, students are doing daily geography practice. In the afternoon, we have been studying Native Americans, Spanish explorers coming to America, and pilgrims. As a writing project this week, we talked about writing from another point of view. Students were asked to write a journal from the point of view of a pilgrim on the Mayflower. It has been wonderful seeing many great and creative ideas in this project!

There will be no reading groups next week, as we will be taking our language block to do different Thanksgiving and reading activities. On Monday, we will begin our "Deck the Halls with 2nd Graders" project. Be sure to visit the pod in December to see the 2nd grade display! On Tuesday, we will make our pumpkin pie in a bag! Thank you SO much to all of you who have sent/are sending ingredients on Monday. This is always a favorite project for our class, and a great chance to have our own class Thanksgiving celebration!

As part of our "Deck the Halls with 2nd Graders" project, we will need hair-colored yarn. I have some yellow, red, black, and brown yarn, but could always use more of these...especially brown and yellow. If you are someone who has spare yarn in your house that could be used and would like to donate some, please e-mail me over the weekend and let me know what colors you are sending. I will plan on doing some yarn-shopping on Sunday or Monday for the colors that we are still low on.

I hope you all have a WONDERFUL Thanksgiving with your family. It was great seeing all of you at conferences last week, and I am truly thankful to have the opportunity to work with your terrific kids this year!