Welcome to 2nd Grade!

It was so great seeing so many of you at Parent Information Night last week!  It is going to be an exciting year with many changes and opportunities, and I am so happy to be working with such a wonderful group of supportive parents.  If you were unable to attend Parent Information Night, please look through the folder your child brought home for information on classroom management, curriculum, celebrations, and more.  Let me know if you have any questions.

We have kicked off our year with a Language Arts unit entitled "Building Bridges with Unlikely Friends".  Many of the new KCCR standards will be covered in this unit.  Students are learning about the differences between figurative and literal language, how authors often teach life lessons through their writing, and how to retell a story.  During our writing time, students are working on sentence writing and the parts of a friendly letter.  As we go through this unit, we are working with a 5th grade class in Richmond, Indiana through letters and e-mails.  We are tying the standards in with several read-aloud books, including the works of Kevin Henkes (the author of Chrysanthemum) and Isabella Hatkoff (the young co-author of the Owen and Mzee books).   

To begin the year in math, students are exploring equations, math strategies, and story problems.  As we go deeper into strategies and math vocabulary this year, students will be doing a lot of practice with having math conversations and explaining their thinking in writing, pictures, and words.  As we talked about last week, students are bringing home math homework a couple of times a week to use to facilitate math talk.  Thank you for your help in getting this done.  Remember....if it takes your child more than 20 minutes to do math homework, feel free to call it quits for the night and just send me a note letting me know. 

Some very special visitors will be coming to stay in our classroom next week!  Our Monarch butterfly larvae are scheduled to arrive on Tuesday.  During this unit in science, 2nd graders are studying different life cycles, the traits of insects, and Monarch butterflies.  We look forward to releasing some of our own Monarchs this fall! 

I am looking over volunteer needs right now and will be sending out an e-mail soon to those of you who signed up to help in our classroom.  Thank you for your patience as I try to get organized enough to put things like that together. 

Have a great week!  Thanks, as always, for all that you do.