WM 2nd Grade Curriculum Update
April 2019
Reading and Writing
Reading:
In Reader’s Workshop students will be starting a new unit: Reading and Role-Playing Fairy Tales, Folktales, Fables, and Fantasy. The first part of the unit immerses students into the world of folktales and fairytales. Together with a partner, they will read multiple texts in the genre looking for common elements and themes as they retell texts encompassing narrative elements. The second part of the unit students will be stepping into the character’s shoes, feeling, thinking, and acting in order to gain a deeper understanding of them. Students will be working on fluency and demonstrate comprehension by reading with expression and prosody. By the end of the unit students will work in book clubs working together to consider the lessons characters learn and to compare how different authors explore similar morals in very different ways. Students will learn to compare and contrast characters, storylines, morals and lessons in two or more versions of the same story by different authors.
Writing:
In Writer’s Workshop students will be starting a new unit : Writing About Reading. Students will start the unit off by writing letters about characters they’ve met in their books, formulating opinions and supporting their ideas, providing reasons, and using details and examples from the text to support their claims. Writing workshop will look very similar to reader’s workshop in that students will be learning to read and reread closely to come up with more ideas for opinions, more details and evidence to support their opinions, as well as fun conventions that authors and illustrators use to fancy up and make their writing interesting. Finally, students will move away from persuasive letters into more of an essay format as they write to persuade others that their favorite books are worthy of awards.
Math
Unit 6: Geometry
In this unit your child will be working on the following skills:
Identify and describe, draw and create 2-D shapes based on their defining features.
Explore the area of shapes, especially rectangles
Split whole shapes into 2,3, or 4 equal parts called halves, thirds or fourth/quarters
Recognize that equal parts of identical wholes do not need to be the same shape
Unit 7: Measurement, Fractions & Multi-Digit Computation with Hungry Ants
Estimate, measure, and compare the lengths of objects in centimeters and meters
Split whole shapes into 2, 3, 4, or 8 equal parts called halves, thirds, fourths/quarters or eighths
Solve, pose, and write addition, subtraction, and money story problems involving 2- and 3-digit numbers
Science
Second Graders will rotate between the following Foss units:
Air and Weather
Solids and Liquids
New Plants
Social Studies
Our next unit will be studying marketplace and local production in social studies. The big ideas of this unit are: producers and consumers depend on each other, people make money in different ways to pay for goods and services, raw materials become a product, products come from a producer, wants vs. needs, and families have to budget their money.
LMC - Library
We’ll be using Makerspace materials to work together to solve problems and meet challenges. Through these experiences, we’ll learn about teamwork and communication!
Music
Mrs. Spahn’s classes will be working on: Reviewing rhythms, including an introduction to the half note and the whole note!
Ms. Soltis’ classes will be working on: continuing to learn about the instrument families. We will review the Brass family and continue on with the percussion and woodwind families. Students will get to experiment with our many classroom percussion instruments, as well as, investigate Miss Soltis’ woodwind instruments up close!
Technology
Students will learn that the information they put online leaves a digital footprint or “trail.” Students will explore what information is appropriate to be put online. They will also judge the nature of different types of digital footprints by following the information trails of two fictional animals.
Art
Why are some artists famous? How can art be powerful? How can art change your mood? (Haring’s Bending Bodies)
PE
Students will participate in Spring fitness testing and our Track & Field Unit. We will try and get outside as much as possible as well!