Mrs. Esgro's Weekly Update
Buffalo Trail Elementary
Happy New Year!
Welcome back second grade families! We are off to a great start so far for 2016. The students transitioned right back into their routines yesterday and earned another behavior reward. They choose a technology party. This Friday, we will have a 30 minute technology party in our classroom. Your child may bring an electronic from home. As I have done in past years, we will lock the electronics up in the cabinet when they get to school until it is time for our party. They will bring their devices home at the end of the day. We will also have the laptop cart that students can use if they do not bring in a personal device.
Reading
As readers, we are working on categorizing and classifying items into groups. This is a skill that was introduced in preschool and kindergarten, and now we are ready to dig deep into this concept. We began the week by sorting books into different categories based on something they had in common. By the end of the week we will be classifying characters and I will introduce the terms "protagonist" and "antoginist", and what traits a character might have to fit in either category. Classifying is a skill that your child will use throughout the upper grades, especially in science.
Writing
As authors, we are back to studying narratives. We began by brainstorming our memories from Winter Break. Today, students choose their most meaningful memory and we used a Bubble Map to describe the memory. Tomorrow we will transfer our adjectives from our Bubble Map into complete thoughts in a Flow Map. We will also be taking about catchy leads. I am going to show the students a few Disney Pixar movie intros to demonstrate how a great lead grab's the audience's attention.
Math
As math thinkers, we are in our third unit. Our focus for this unit is on place value. Specifically, we are working on composing and decomposing groups of tens and ones to add and subtract triple digit numbers. Your child may mention the words "presents and parcels". Putting this idea into context by thinking of presents as single items and parcels as groups of tens, helps children gain a better understanding.
Book bags
Book bags will come home this Friday! Please ask your child to read his or her guided reading book to you and I encourage your to ask questions along the way, such as:
What do we know about the character so far? (Fiction)
What was the turning point, or climax in the story? (Fiction)
What did you learn about ... (Non-fiction)
Where could I go to find information about... (Non-fiction, using text features)