This week, we continued our study of unlikely friendships. We read the story of Owen and Mzee. I'm sure your child would love to tell you this true story of a baby hippo that befriended an elderly tortoise in Africa! Today, students watched several video clips of other unlikely animal friendships (if you click on the first link under the Language Arts tab on the right side of this page, you can watch the videos, too!) On Monday, students will work in pairs to illustrate and write about one of the unlikely friendships. We will also continue studying vocabulary from the story of Owen and Mzee. We are working together to practice dictionary use, think about the context of words in books, and to put definitions into our own words.
Next week, we will read through some of the stories in the popular "George and Martha" series. We will have a discussion about different book genres with similar themes (Like "Owen and Mzee", the "George and Martha" books are about friendship and include hippos...but they are made up stories, unlike "Owen and Mzee" which is a true story). During this book study, we will look at how authors often use their writing to teach life lessons. As a class, we will try to figure out what lessons about friendship James Marshall teaches in his writing. We will also continue to practice looking at the context of unknown words to determine what the words mean.
I can't begin to tell you how excited I am to start our Writer's Workshop on Monday! Before we jump into the four units I told you about last night, we are going to take a week to establish procedures. At this time, we will also work on composing friendly letters. This will tie in to a brief pen pal activity we are starting. I have connected with a friend who teaches writing at a junior high school in Tennessee, and our class is going to be e-mailing one of her classes as a part of our "Building Bridges with Unlikely Friends" unit. We will work on finding things we have in common with this faraway class. We are excited to receive some friendly letters back from our new buddies!
This week in math, we reviewed math mountains and fact strategies. We will continue this unit on basic addition and subtraction next week. Since we haven't yet sorted students for our break-out math groups, we will also be taking some time in the afternoons to incorporate technology into our math lessons. If you look under the math menu to the right of this post, there are some great interactive math games and activities. I will be sharing these with students in class, but you are also free to explore them at home!
Our 2nd grade homework schedule will start next week. Your child now has a copy of the schedule tucked into the back pocket of his or her home folder. We won't start spelling for another week or two, so there will be no homework on Monday (if you want to start establishing the full schedule before then, this would be a GREAT time to look over the district's 2nd grade word list...let me know if you want a copy). Our first blog question will be posted Tuesday, math homework will come home Wednesday, and I will have reading logs in each child's home folder on Thursday. Please remember that your child is not expected to work on homework for more than 20 minutes on one night. If he or she hits a point of frustration, particularly on math nights, please e-mail me or send me a note so that I can help support your child in class with the assignment.
Let me know if you have any questions about upcoming activities. As always, thanks for all you do to support learning in our classroom! Have a great weekend!
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