This week in 2nd grade...

This is for the week of Jan 30th!

Reading

This week we will be activating our background knowledge, like we did this past week, to help us understand how to use context to understand the meaning of a word, use text features to identify important words, identify key vocabulary, check the meaning with similar words, and explore similar words meaning. 

Words of the Week

We began words of the week this past week. Our words were would, very, your, its, around. This week our words will be don't, right, green, their, call. Each day we work with spelling the words and using them sentences to practice. We are also using our words of the week to help us practice our handwriting.

Math

In math, we are doing a quick unit over 2 digit subtraction. Along with addition, our goal is that students understand the place value behind the numbers, and can correctly break apart numbers and use what they know to help them subtract. In future grades, they will learn how to stack and subtract, and while we will cover that for a day, our focus will be on: using a hundreds chart to subtract, subtracting tens, ones, and adding the differences (when it applies), using place value blocks, and making numbers friendly (we are calling these landmark numbers) to help them subtract (ie. 59- 42 is the same as 59-40= 19 --> 19-2 = 7). 

Our math test will be Friday, February 2nd. I will send home a review for students to practice on Thursday evening. As always, feel free to have students practice. For the test, they will need to be able to use the strategies subtract the tens, ones, and add the differences (like the break apart of subtraction), and hundreds chart to solve problems. There will be one question per each of those strategies as they both focus specifically on place value. Similarly to addition, there will be 7 subtraction problems they will be asked to solve in any way they feel comfortable. The test will end with 3 word problems, as we are working on picking apart word problems and using the problem to help us find the answer! They did SO AMAZING on the post test for addition, I'm sure subtraction will be no different!

Writing

We will conclude our informational writing on Wednesday with our writing test. We have published one piece thus far, taking it through the writing process and explaining each part, and are working on planning and drafting our hornworm piece, in the hopes it is finished by next week. I am blown away by how hard they focus during writing each day!

As a hornworm update: a large majority of our worms are in their pupa! This means they will emerge in apprx. 21 to 28 days as moths!

As always, please follow me on Twitter @msklister and if you need to get ahold of me, email me at klister@cpsk12.org or message me on Remind!