2nd graders travel the world!

I really enjoyed meeting with all of you at conferences last week! It is so hard to believe that we are into our last trimester of the school year. It has been such a fun year, and I am really looking forward to many more adventures in our classroom this spring!

Students were assessed on coin counting and subtraction with ungrouping on Thursday. They did a really great job! We are now working on a mini-unit on geometry. Vocabulary words students are learning include: congruent, polygons, regular polygons, irregular polygons, area, similar, slide, flip, and turn. This unit will wrap up at the end of the week, and then we will revisit both 2-digit addition and subtraction strategies in unit 11.

During our language block, we have been working on using a dictionary. Students are assigned a different word each day to look up in a dictionary, using guide words and knowledge of alphabetical order. We will continue dictionary practice this week. We will also start our new author study...Joanna Cole, the author of the Magic School Bus books. If your child has any Magic School bus books to share, he or she is welcome to bring them in and we will have a look!

For the next week and a half, students will be working on using the six trait model to write personal narratives and stories. This week, we will be focusing on word choice, organization, and sentence fluency. Late next week, our class will begin a research writing project on animals.

We are starting one of my favorite social studies units! For the next month, students will be travelling the world! Our class will "visit" every continent and learn about language, culture, foods, and landforms in each continent. On the geography assessment at the end of the unit, students will be responsible for labeling the 7 continents and the oceans on a blank world map. This would be a great thing for you to be working on with your child! I have added a link to an online game to practice this skill under our Social Studies links...check it out!

Our field trip to the Kansas City zoo is scheduled for Friday, April 29. I will be needing 5 volunteers to ride the bus with us to the zoo and help lead student groups. 3 of you have already volunteered for this, so I need two more! This will be on a "first come, first served" basis. Of course, if the bus fills up, some of you are welcome to meet us at the zoo as well!

As always, thank you for all that you do!