Grade 2 News
Thursday, January 14, 2016
Upcoming Events:
Friday, Jan. 29: Last day of Semester 1 (Reports go home)
Feb. 1 - 7 Feb: Winter Break
Feb. 8: Classes resume (first day of swimming)
Feb. 17 & 18: Three-Way Conferences
Upcoming Field Trips:
Thursday, Jan. 14 - 2c Library Visit
Friday, Jan. 15 - 2d Library Visit
Thursday, Jan. 28 - 2a Library Visit
PE: Swimming Semester 2
Place: Stadtbad Mitte, Gartenstraße 5 10115 Berlin - Mitte
Start Date: Monday, 8th February 2016
Equipment: swimming costume, towel, flip-flops, 10 cents for the hair drier and goggles.
Schedules:
2A 8:00-8:45
2C 8:50- 9:35
2D 9:40- 10:25
2B10:30- 11:15
*** 2a students should be at the pool by 7:50 in order to change and be in the pool by 8!
Note from the teachers
We also welcome any parents who might have expertise in science or technology to come and share an experiment or talk about your experience!
Ways to help at home
- Encourage students to look for simple machines at home or around the city!
- See an example of a simple machine in a magazine or newspaper? Or have real examples at home? Bring them in to share!
- Have a cool science book at home? Bring it in to share with the class!
- Play the websites below for more opportunities to learn about geometry and science!
Online geometry games!
Unit of Inquiry: How the World Works
Central Idea: People apply their understanding of forces and energy to invent and create
Lines of Inquiry:
- Inventions that impact people's lives
- How circumstances lead to the creation of important inventions
- How understanding forces and energy helps inventors
Profiles: inquirers, knowledgeable
Attitudes: creativity, curiosity
Unit Vocabulary:
motion, force, energy, friction, invent, create, machines, inventions, push, pull, heat, light, movement, electricity
Language concepts:
- Instructional writing
- Practice using dictionaries
- Use punctuation to add meaning to writing
- Practice editing own work
Spelling Investigations:
- compound words (ex: sunshine, rainbow, classroom)
- contractions (ex: don't, I'll, we've)
Mathematics concepts during this unit:
- identify and describe various two-dimensional shapes (rhombus, trapezoid, hexagon, pentagon, semi-circle and octagon) and three-dimensional figures (i.e., cubes, prisms, pyramids)
- sort and classify 2d and 3d shapes by their geometric properties (i.e. number and shape of faces)
- estimate, measure and record the capacity and/or mass of an object, using a variety of non-standard units
Number Skills this semester (continued outside of the unit):
- Place value to 1,000
- Add and subtract 1 and 2 digit numbers
- Skip counting by 2, 5, 10 and 100 (forward and backward)
- Continue to interpret word problems
Grade 2 Learning in Action
German
Writing
Students started the school year with a narrative about their winter holidays. Hereby, we are learning to use a variety of sentence starters such as dann, danach, am Anfang, am Wochenende, zuerst, and als nächstes. We also thought about our New Year's resolutions. Hereby, we wrote down what we would like to learn this year, what we would like to improve and who we would like to get to know better.
Spelling
We have used these past 2 weeks for the following spelling investigations:
- compound nouns
- singular nouns with a, o, u, and au
- plural nouns with ä, ö, ü, and äu
Ways to help at home
1. Please continue to read with your child at home. When reading identify compound nouns in the text.
2. Think about singular and plural nouns where a vowel changes to an Umlaut (der Kopf - die Köpfe, der Hut - die Hüte, der Ball - die Bälle, der Baum - die Bäume).