2D Newsletter
Week ending May 12th
I hope you are having a nice weekend. Please note upcoming dates and information about the GRADE 2 SERVICE LEARNING PROJECT.
Grade two teachers and students are excited about our upcoming service learning project which is taking place at the end of this month. A special dinner called the “Shukran Dinner” honors all of the workers at ASD - cleaners, guards, cafeteria workers, bus drivers and monitors. This wonderful celebration takes place on Monday May 30th from 5-7 p.m. in the HS/MS cafeteria. Last month, students made individual cards and poems for each worker, and these will be distributed during the celebration. This Sunday your child will bring home a letter about how you can help to Support the Shukran Committee and honor our hardworking ASD workers. Please look out for this letter and other upcoming information about the 2nd grade service learning project.
Upcoming Important dates:
May 22 PD – No Students
May 24 Full Day of School – Tuesday Morning Schedule
May 24 Principals Coffee 8-9am in ESPR
May 30 Irish Storyteller Visit
I hope you also enjoy all the photos below.
Kindly,
Penny
Curriculum Updates
Math: This week in math, students used math drawings to represent equal groups, and relate them to repeated addition. They also were introduced to arrays and how to compose arrays from rows and columns and count to find the total using objects. Today the unit newsletter was sent home in your child’s folder. Please take time to look through this informative letter about the final math unit of the year. The 2nd grade team kindly asks that you not teach multiplication facts as something to be memorized. This prevents students from reasoning out and practicing working with groups of the same number. Thank you for your support with this.
Reading: Many students have read three or more books in a series by now, and they’ve been enjoying sharing their ideas with both their partners and their club members. Other students have moved onto to yet another series and are able to do some comparing and contrasting work. Readers have also been making decisions about which ideas are important to share with their club. Readers have also been noticing how authors craft their stories by using precise words. Students enjoy finding examples of literary language in their own books -- and have been inspired to try using literary language in their writing. We have taken a closer look at how author’s use precise words and extraordinary language to make vivid pictures in our minds. We recapped on how we can use what we already know to predict what will happen next in the story and we explored how the use of punctuation by an author brings a story to life. We continued to find examples of these in our Series books.
Writing: Writers have been remembering all they’ve learned about nonfiction book features and incorporating those features into their own writing. They’ve also been learning about time management, working to a deadline, as next week will be their last opportunity to revise, edit, and get ready to publish what may well be the last nonfiction book they produce as a grade two writer. We are sprinting along with the completion of our non-fiction writing and we are paying close attention to our audience and what they might want to learn from a book like ours. We are also carefully crafting introductions to our topics and conclusions that may be a call to action, a connection back to the start of the book/chapter, or we may end with an exploratory question that may have arisen throughout the writing of our book.
Science: We have had a chance to do a lot of experimenting as we continued our study of forces and motion by experimenting with different surfaces. We wanted to know which type of surface had more or less friction. We used toy cars, ramps, carpets, sandpaper, foam, and more to help us learn about how friction works! Students also continued to grow their knowledge about forces and motion by learning about gravity and balance this week. They learned that balance is when gravity is pulling down on something equally. Next week we will learn about another force: magnetism. Here is a link for a fun at home experiment about gravity and magnets if you would like to try. http://buggyandbuddy.com/gravity/