Sunny Days in Second Grade: This week in 2nd grade...

Happy Monday!

We had such a great day today! All of our routines and procedures are coming together nicely, and I am so excited to really get a feel for the year ahead. On the blog, my goal is to update you on our progress as a class! To begin...

Writing

We began our first unit of study today! We are focusing on small moments and turning those into long stories (stretching). You will see your student come home with a tiny topic notebook (within the next few days). Their goal for these notebooks is to capture small moments using short phrases to remember the moment they are capturing! Today, we unveiled our writer's notebooks and will begin writing in those shortly! More about writing to come, along with some examples, hopefully later this week!

Math

We are well into our math topic! Our first topic is a review of addition and subtraction from first grade. We are asking students draw pictures and really think through each problem. We talk a lot about parts and wholes and how those help us know that we are doing addition or subtraction. The test for this topic (since it is a review unit we will review and test on the same day) is on Thursday. If you would like to practice at home, giving short word problems or simple addition/subtraction sentences are a great place to start. As a class, we struggled more with subtraction vs. addition (to be expected), but are doing an awesome job working through these struggles, and turning them into real learning! We have tomorrow and Wednesday, and will use this time to practice more with these types of problems!

Reading

We began our Daily 5 station routines this previous week and into this week. We are working right now on building our reading stamina. Today, we made it to 12 minutes!! We were so excited!! Our goal is to make it to 20 minutes as a whole class with no distractions. I will begin introducing the other 4 stations (foundation lessons) throughout the week this week, and we will work for a stamina goal for each of these in the coming weeks!

Classroom Community

As a whole class, we have been working hard to make sure we are a community of learners! This includes learning more about one another and about what we enjoy. A lot of our activities last week were focused around community building, and we will continue those into this week. Today, we worked on an activity called "Save Sam." Ask your students about this, because we had SO much fun! It helped us get to know one another and work together as a team. See below for pictures :)