Ms. Salamone November 2010
Dear Families,
I guess it’s officially Fall with this cold weather!
We have made such wonderful progress over the past month – Our room is full of amazing readers, writers and mathematicians!
Parent/teacher conferences are approaching. They will be held on Monday, November 15th. There will be no school on conference day. I am looking forward to discussing your child’s progress thus far in second grade!
As always, please don’t hesitate to contact me about any questions or concerns that you may have. I thank you for all your continued support.
Kindest regards,
Ms. Salamone
Reading:
I have finished formally assessing the children and look forward to sharing the results with you at parent/teacher conferences. I have continued to conference with the students to encourage them to choose books that are “Just Right” for them. We will continue to discuss what a “Just Right” book looks like, while continuing the conversation about how our “Just Right” books change as we become better readers. The children have also been introduced to a browsing schedule in the classroom where they are to search for books that are “just right” for them while also being allowed easy books (what we call Beach Books) and books that we aren’t quite ready for yet (what we call Choice Books) and during Choice Reading time is when we can read our Beach and/or Choice Books. We have also started discussing various ways to figure out a word that we don’t know while we’re reading. I encourage them to chose the strategy that’s right for the unknown word. Soon a bookmark will be sent home that is chock full of strategies that the children have been practicing in the classroom.
We have also discussed the importance of understanding our stories as we are reading them, by having Big Feelings, Questions and even Talking Back to the Book! In addition, we have started to stop ourselves every few pages to think about who is in the story, where are they, and what is happening. We even started to make and check our predictions.
We have been introduced to our Reading Partners and have practiced the routines of Partner Reading. We have practiced what it looks like, sounds like, and feels like to sit with our partners when we’re reading independently and with our partners. We are also practicing what to do with our partners. For example, I read you a book and then you read me a book, we read a book together, let me show you where I had a big feeling, a question, where I talked back to the book and lastly, let me retell you the story. We are building our menu of things to do with our reading partners. Try partner reading with your child at home!
We have also been practicing reading fluently and with expression through singing songs and poems!
Up next: Fiction Character Study!
Writer’s Workshop:
We are finishing our Small Moment unit in writing true stories from our own lives. We practiced what it means and looks like to tell stories across several pages. We also practiced writing our stories to include a beginning, a middle and an end. We have gone through the writing process from brainstorming to drafting to revising to editing to publishing!!!
We will spend the last three weeks of November revising a few of our small moment stories by adding sentences, new pages, descriptive words, our feelings and emotions, sound words, and even weather details.
Up next: Revision!
Mathematics
We have finished Unit 2 in math where we focused in on addition and subtraction facts. We each have our own math fact family triangles in our homework folder and we are expected to practice our math fact family triangles 5 minutes every night. These math triangles help us with our math fact fluency. If you have misplaced your math fact family triangles, please do not hesitate to let me know. We have many extras. To solve our math facts faster, we have begun to identify and using patterns, working backwards, using pictures and models, using manipulatives, and using number models. Unit 2 tests are posted on webgrader.
We are in the middle of Unit 3 where we are studying place value, money, and time. In this unit we are buying and selling objects with coins, practicing making and telling time, identifying place values in our numbers, and making and reading bar graphs! At home have you child count your change and tell you the time on an analog clock (to the nearest 5 minutes).
Up next: Addition and Subtraction
Word Study:
We have added many new words to our word wall over the past month.
We have also worked on our spelling in our word work groups and have learned different spelling patterns, including –at, -at, -ing, -all, -eep through our work with our poems and big books. Please continue to encourage your child to write the sounds of the words that they hear, including vowels!
Science:
We have dived right into our science studies! We always look forward to our new investigations and discoveries. We spend time in both our own classroom and Ms. Clazmer’s classroom. We have learned so much about air. We have learned: air is matter, air takes up space, air interacts with objects, air resistance affects how things move, air can be compressed, the pressure from compressed air can move things, and that air is a gas! We learned all of this by constructing: parachutes, balloon rockets, and air and water fountains. We were able to use syringes to push on air and investigate air underwater. We even wrote a small moment in writing about our balloon rockets and used real science words and recorded all our science thinking!
Up Next: Observing Weather
October Celebration:
Thank you to our parent volunteers for organizing an AMAZING October celebration. We had three stations where we constructed skeletons out of noodles, used permanent markers to decorate mini-pumpkins, and even stuck our hands into different substances (Jell-O, Spaghetti, Apple Sauce, Pudding) to pull out a prize! We even had cupcakes and juice! We were full of smiles this day!
Due to the poor weather, our pumpkin patch field trip was cancelled. However, we had a very, very fun day in second grade. We read 3 October/Harvest books, could free read any book in our library, wrote about anything our hearts desired, decorated our room for our October Celebration, and even watched a movie with the rest of second grade. It was a great day after all!