End of first trimester!

I am looking forward to seeing all of you next week!  I have so much to share about the progress that has been made in 2nd grade during this past trimester.  It's hard to believe that we are rolling into 2nd trimester now!  Here's where we are headed next in our classroom:

In math, students were assessed this week on parallel lines, quadrilaterals, parallelograms, and the properties of shapes.  Next week, we will begin Math Expressions Unit 4.  In this unit, students will look at ways to add numbers up to 200.  This is a longer unit in which many skills are taught.  Please keep an eye out for handouts and homework pieces that will come home detailing the expectations during this unit.  Thank you for your consistency in helping support your child at home during homework time.  Homework assignments continue to be an extremely valuable tool in our class for facilitating "math talk".

1st trimester reading assessments were completed this week, and it appears that students have learned many reading skills since the beginning of the year.  At conferences I will plan to go over reading levels, decoding and fluency expectations, comprehension expectations, and activities to help you support your child at home.  If there are other specific resources you would like to see pertaining to your child's reading level, please contact me early next week so that I can have some items pulled out.  During our language block, our class is also studying the author Janell Cannon, who wrote books such as Stellaluna, Crickwing, Pinduli, and Verdi.  Her books are being used in our class to expose students to word choice in writing, as she is known for her wonderful use of descriptive language.  Students are also using her books to work with cause and effect in narrative texts, story mapping narrative texts, and making connections between expository and narrative writing.  If you have not already done so, please check your child's folder for a fun activity to do at home that ties in with the book Crickwing.  I would love to have these creative projects back in time to display them at conferences.

In writing, students have been practicing the use of the writing process to produce technical writing pieces and descriptive paragraphs.  I will have several work samples to share with you next week.  Students had so much fun yesterday hosting their 5th grade book buddies to work on our technical writing project, "How to Draw a Monster".  It was a great way to kick off Halloween at Langston Hughes!

I am sure that you have been hearing many fun health facts from your 2nd graders over the past few weeks!  They have been very engaged learning about the body systems, caring for their eyes and ears, reading product labels and advertisements wisely, and staying clean and healthy.  This evening, your child brought home a letter on bright pink paper letting you know about a collaborative project our class will be doing next week to wrap up our study of the human body.  Each child is responsible for bringing in an item or two to contribute to his or her group's project.  If you are unable to provide the item your child chose, please let me know and I will be happy to contact someone else in the group.  This isn't meant to be a financial burden or something time-consuming for you to worry about this weekend...most of the items chosen were things that you probably have at home already.  Feel free to contact me with any questions.

We have been lucky to find some time over the past couple of weeks to focus on some fun activities that tie in with our curriculum!  This week, we took a day to learn about bats and how their ears and methods for hearing are different from our's.  Students learned the word "echolocation", made bat finger puppets to act out Janell Cannon's book Stellaluna, and decorated our classroom for Halloween with some creative bats of their own.  We were able to host Cameron's mom, Dr. Vaughn, last week to talk with the class about the body systems.  Students were fascinated with some of the things that she brought!  Everyone really enjoyed the Halloween parade and party yesterday....thanks to all of you who helped plan that; it was wonderful!

During the month of November, I will be incorporating the theme of pumpkins into our curriculum.  Students will decorate the room with stained glass pumpkins, use the writing process to write a descriptive piece on pumpkins, and learn to make "pumpkin pie in a bag" as we conclude our first major Social Studies unit on the history of the United States.  Students will read and write historical fiction pieces during this study.  We will, of course, also take some time next week to learn about the election process and how our government works.  November is going to be an exciting month, indeed!  December will be here before we know it.  It is starting to sink in that I will soon be missing my 2nd graders a lot during the months of January and February!

As we are wrapping up the trimester and beginning several new things, we will be taking a break from the spelling curriculum until the Wednesday after conferences.  We will use our spelling time to do some lessons on contractions, possessive nouns, and to review basic writing conventions such as capitalization and punctuation.  To give you time to enjoy the family turkeys, Crickwing project, and locating materials for our body system project, I also won't be giving any math homework next week.

There will be no school tomorrow, November 2, due to our teacher recording and reporting day.  There will also be no school next Thursday and Friday.  I hope that you enjoy this time having your children at home.  Have a wonderful weekend and, as always, thank you for your support and all that you do.