Weekly Wrap-Up: September 2, 2011

I am amazed at how quickly the weeks fly by this year! Our new schedule keeps us really busy during the day, so I guess that's why the time goes so fast.

I'm going to try to do a little wrap-up each week as my schedule allows. Just so you can peek into what we did in the classroom all week.

Math- We worked really hard all week on break-aparts, partners, and totals. These are probably foreign terms to you- they were to me until we started this new math curriculum! A break-apart is really just the two numbers that equal another number. So if I give the kids the number 9, they tell me that 4 & 5 is a break-apart. Or 6 & 3. We also interchange the name "partners" to those numbers. Either way, that's what we're talking about. Today's "Dear Family" letter that came home today will explain a little more in detail about what this is about. We also studied the U.S. coins closely. Did you know that the back of the nickel is a picture of Monticello, which is the house the Thomas Jefferson designed, built, and lived in?

Spelling- We have been learning & practicing our routine using high frequency words. We have several different activities we do to help us learn to write and read our high frequency words- Build Mix Fix (building with letters), Look Say Cover Write Check (writing them without looking), Rainbow Words (writing them using five different colors), and Spider Spelling ("racing" the words against each other to see which one is written most after rolling a dice). We'll be adding more activities to our list but for now four is enough! Next week we will learn how to choose our own words to use during these spelling games.

Reading- We have pretty much mastered Read to Self time. This week we've moved on to Read to Someone. During Read to Someone we sit in EEKK (elbow to elbow, knee to knee) position with our partner. We take turns reading one of the just right books from our browsing bags. We've done pretty good with Read to Someone time... the one thing we're working on is listening to our partner when they are reading. It's SO easy to get distracted! :)

Content- Content is either science or social studies. We're kind of easing into this area a little slower than reading, math & writing. This is the first year second grade has had any kind of curriculum for science. I'm very excited but I want to make sure I'm doing it right! We'll start science next week. Instead, this week we've been talking about how to be a good friend & using manners.

Writing- As you may have seen from our pictures earlier in the week, we spent one of our writing blocks outside writing! That was very exciting for us! We have been working on using correct capitalization and punctuation this week, as well. Mrs. Moberg came and taught a lesson on Thursday to reinforce using capitals and end marks. Friday we wrote a birthday book for Jeremiah whose birthday is on Monday. Happy birthday, Jeremiah!

A couple of other exciting things happened this week. We had book buddies for the first time! We are book buddies with Mrs. Yoder's 4th Graders. We were all very excited to interview and introduce each other on Thursday. We look forward to meeting with them every two weeks. We also used the laptops for the first time on Friday! Oh my goodness, you would have thought it was Christmas morning in Room 527! They were very excited and listened to procedures pretty good considering. We played a math fact game called Tux Math. We'll soon learn how to get online and play games on some fun kids' sites.

I hope you have a wonderful LONG weekend! Don't forget there is no school on Monday and Tuesday is a late arrival (8:35 doors open) morning. See you then!