Mrs. Nigro's News
January 7, 2016
Happy New Year!
The new year is off to a great start in our 2nd grade classroom. The children have come back to school ready to get the ball rolling. In the beginning of the week each child picked a focus word off of our social contract to work on as a 'goal' for the remaining part of the school year. Please ask your child which area they chose and how they plan to obtain their goal.
We Are.....GOWER WEST!
Literacy Update
Our focus text for the week was Ah, Music by Aliki. The children enjoyed reading about music and learning about different kinds of instruments. In guided reading groups students learned about different instrument families or how people in Africa used the 'talking drum' hundreds of years ago to communicate with neighboring communities. We continued to learned about text features and author's purpose.
During word work we identified the vowel digraphs: ai and ay. The students made observations that typically the ai pattern is found in the middle of the word and ay pattern is located at the end of the word.
We spent the week writing about our winter break. We decided as a class that this piece of writing should include at least 3 paragraphs. We also know it is important to introduce our writing with a hook and introduction along with wrapping our writing up with a conclusion. This writing piece is a work in progress, but please ask your child to see their writing on their iPad.
Unit 4 in Math
In the beginning of the week the students had the opportunity to practice counting money using dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies. On Wednesday our focus moved onto subtracting triple/double digits. We spent a lot of time discussing how dollars, dimes, and pennies are just like hundreds, tens, and ones. We model how at times we need to trade a dollar to ten dimes and then in turn at times exchange a dime for ten pennies. In subtraction these same ideas apply as students 'borrow' from the hundreds or tens place. You probably have noticed that just like during our addition unit the methods introduced to your child have different names from what we learned in school. The two methods that we briefly introduced this week were Expanded Subtraction and the Ungroup First Method. The Ungroup First Method is very similar to how we learned to subtract when we were in school. We will continue to dig deeper into these new methods next week.
Mrs. Traci Nigro
Email: tnigro@gower62.com
Website: gower62.com
Location: Gower West Elementary School, Clarendon Hills Road, Willowbrook, IL, United States
Phone: 630-323-6446