Almost time for Purim!

Reading

The students worked on summarizing fiction and nonfiction stories. They are trying to focus on the most important details in their stories and include only the main ideas. This week the students also learned how to identify idioms and explain what they really mean using clues in the story. Some of the idioms they learned are piece of cake, zip your mouth, keeping my eye on you, and hang on. We finished another chapter book read aloud and the students got to choose to write a book review or another chapter of the book. I was impressed with their creative ideas and how they were able to mimic the characters’ voices in their writing.

Spelling

The students studied words that contain the vowel pairs ea and ai. Next week, we will work on long vowel words where you drop the “e” to add “ed” or “ing”, like in the words graded and writing.

Grammar

In second grade, there are many new aspects of grammar and writing mechanics for the students to learn. In the upcoming weeks, the students will focus on commas, apostrophes, and quotation marks.

Writing

The students wrote “small moment” stories this week. These stories talked about something special they do frequently, so that they were able to describe the event using as many adjectives as possible. The students wrote about playing with pets after school, weekly Shabbat dinners, and reading books with their moms and dads. The stories were very descriptive, and they were able to take a sentence like, “I read for twenty minutes after school,” and revise it to say, “Each day, I plop down on the soft, brown, couch and open my big book of stories.”

Next week, the students will continue filling their writing with details and interesting words. Each student will pick a favorite food and try to describe it as best they can without telling their reader the name of the food. This is a fun project that brings out a lot of creative words!

Math

The students worked on finding efficient ways to add multiple numbers. For example, if you need to add 10 + 17 + 13 + 10, you can start with 10 + 10 = 20, then add that to 17 + 13 = 30. They have learned that you don’t have to stack the numbers in a big column or add them in order! We played a game called Basketball Addition to practice this skill. The students also worked on evaluating a set of data by finding the median (middle number), mode (most popular or frequent number), and range (maximum number minus the minimum number). The students often forget that to do any of those skills, you first put the numbers in order from least to greatest! We will continue practicing these skills next week and work on measuring to the closest centimeter and inch.

Project Based Learning- Social Studies and Science

The students completed their news show on natural resources this week. I am so proud of their hard work! They would like to invite you to join us for an informal viewing party on March 29^th at 2:00 P.M. in the second grade classroom.

Technology

Next week, the students begin their six week study of technology with Mrs. Gamlin!