Progress Not Perfection

It was a fine, fine week in 2nd grade -- but not perfect.  I missed a couple of my friends; flu and allergy season is upon us. 

In Math ... we have been working on 2 digit plus 2 digit addition using a hundreds chart, using base 10 blocks and an open numberline.  As my mathematicians become more experienced, they will certainly have a favorite strategy, but they must recognize all strategies and how they are related.  These three strategies all decompose numbers into their place value parts to make them easier to combine**** If you as a parent are not sure you know what these strategies look like, take a look in the handouts for parents.  I've posted a few pictures.

In Science ... we have been describing matter using a variety of properties and then examining the effects of adding heat to matter.  Who knew melting a crayon would be a WHOA moment -- truly the beauty of this age.  We are about to use our understanding of different properties to start a STEAM bridge project that will culminate in presentations to parents the week of 10/8.  Please send in paper towel rolls, toilet paper rolls and boxes for building materials.

In Reading ...we have been looking at fiction for a few weeks and are going to explore some non-fiction for a while -- we will be primarily discussing text features and how they support our understanding as a reader.  We'll integrate some social studies by reading about citizenship and about some of the defining moments in our country's history.

In Writing ... the kids completed their first "real" word study unit and although they are newbies at looking at word structure/spelling generalizations they did well.  Our language is influenced by so many cultures it is sometimes easy to forget that there are some phonetic and spelling rules that are pretty consistent.  We learned the 5 main parts of  a friendly letter this week and tried our hand at a thank you letter to some staff members.  Moving forward we'll be writing expository to reflect our study of non-fiction writing.

Remember:  Our class is presenting author/illustrator Marla Frazee at the Texas Book Festival 10/28

We've got two important birthdays this week!  Happy birthday to Finn on Tuesday and to Mathias on Thursday!!