Second Grade News
February 2020
Dates to Remember
2/12 Grandparent Open House 8:15
2/17 - No School
2/18 - Teacher Workday (No School)
2/20 - STEAM Night 5:30 - 7:00
STEAM Night
Valentine's Day
Ready to Learn Bell
The Secret World of Pollination
What will your student be learning?
Students will study the topic of plants, with a focus on learning about plant stages. The learning will focus on these ideas:
- Plants need light and water to grow.
- All plants go through the same stages as they grow.
How will your student be learning?
Throughout the unit, your student will read, think, listen, talk, write, draw, and ask questions about the topic of how plants grow and survive. Students will participate in these activities among others, to build their literacy skills:
- Listening to read-alouds of a variety of texts about plants.
- Participating in "open sorts" of plant parts to decide how they are related to each other.
- Singing songs about plants.
- Engaging in collaborative conversations with classmates.
- Writing and drawing about plant parts.
- Asking and answering questions about what plants need to grow and survive.
What can you do to support your student's learning at home?
Here are a few activities that you can do at home with your student to support his or her learning:
- Ask your student to talk with you about this question: How do plants grow and survive?
- Read books and sing songs about plants from home or at the library.
- Identify different types of plants around your home, explain what helps them grow, and help your student learn how to care for them.
- Encourage your student to read to you every night.
This winter, we are working on two-digit and three-digit addition and subtraction within 1,000. Students can use mental math and reasoning strategies to understand and solve addition and subtraction problems, and move toward applying their place value knowledge to a variety of visual representations (drawings, number lines, and hundreds boards) and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and the relationship between addition and subtraction. Word problems will provide a concrete, familiar context to apply addition and subtraction with three-digit numbers.
Our students learned to recognize and use patterns including:
• the same digit can have a different value based on where it is placed (7, 70, 700, 7000)
• groups of tens and hundreds can be counted (3 hundreds + 4 hundreds is 7 hundreds)
• changing the order of the numbers they are adding does not change the result
• addition and subtraction are related
Please see the link below to watch short videos of how to use proof drawing, open number line and expanded method strategies.
The Second grade team has also started switching students for math lessons. This is based on pre and post assessment data in order to give each group of students targeted instruction and support in the addition and subtraction skills they are developing. Ask your child what skills they are working on each day!