Week of November 13th-17th

Hi Families,
We had a great week! Watch out though, there seem to be many illnesses circulating. Please stay vigilant with hand washing and covering coughs and sneezes. If your child has a frequent cough or sneeze but is well enough to send to school, our class community would greatly appreciate it if they would wear a mask to keep everyone else protected. No one wants to get sick right before the holiday! There will be no Weekly Update next week due to the Thanksgiving holiday. I hope you all have a wonderful Thanksgiving! Safe travels or good luck hosting!

Important Dates

• Monday, November 20th: Special Guest Monday: Jason Hall (Charlie's dad) will be sharing about the trombone!
  
• Wednesday, November 22nd: Turkey Trot and 11:00am dismissal.
• Thursday and Friday, November 23rd and 24th: No School
• Monday, December 4th: Report Cards emailed out
• Thursday, December 7th: Early Release; Parent Teacher Conferences
• Friday, December 8th: No School, Parent Teacher Conferences

Important Notes

• Parent Teacher Conferences:  Please sign up for a conference on my Fall Conference Sign Up Sheet. I look forward to meeting with you in a couple of weeks to discuss your child’s progress in 2nd grade!
• Email Addresses: Due to privacy issues, classroom teachers are not allowed to share out family email addresses. If you have invitations for birthdays, they can only be passed out at school if everyone in the class is invited. For contacting other families digitally, please reach out to the PTO. Thank you!
• Donations for Winter Craft Fair Raffle Basket: Hi Gr 2 friends & family, It's Jen & Kaley again!  This is the last request for raffle basket donations but we are doing one more for the Winter Craft fair.  If you just donated for the Monster Mash, we get it!  Thank you for your generosity and please feel no obligation to donate again.  If you would like to make any monetary donation for the Winter Craft fair raffle basket, Jen & I will be putting one together with a Winter Sports theme...think cold hockey rinks, basketball courts, snowy ski slopes!  We have some local sports shop donations as well (Dynamik gift card & swag bag from the Trophy Shop) so it's going to be a fun basket to raffle off!  Thank you for any support.  *Winter Craft Fair is Dec 2, any donations would be greatly appreciated by Nov 30th.  Venmo @Kaley-Dee (last 4-digits of cell# 8978)

Here are some highlights from this week:

Community Building
This week we continued to practice using self talk to calm and focus ourselves. We continue our community building through our daily Morning Meetings where we greet each other, play an activity, and share about our lives.

This week we also met with our buddy class and read together!

Literacy
We continue in week 2 of our informational unit on Bugs. This week, we focused on how to classify bugs into one of 4 categories based on the number of legs and body sections they have (insect, arachnid, centipede, and millipede). Students picked a bug to research for their final project and began building their knowledge of that bug through reading. 

Phonics and Foundational Skills
This week we continued working on reading and spelling multisyllabic words by studying syllable types: open and closed. We learned how to break a word into syllables depending on the vowel sound of each syllable. For example, the word “human” is broken into “hu” and “man,” because the first syllable’s “u” has a long sound instead of a short sound. Complicating things is the everpresent “schwa” sound in multisyllabic words (the lazy, indistinct vowel sound that can be spelled with any vowel), making spelling extra tricky. For example, in the word, “secret,” the 2nd syllable, “-cret,” has the schwa vowel sound. We learned to recognize which syllable has a schwa sound based on which syllable is unstressed.

Writing
This week we practiced more sentence syntax with a sentence scramble on bugs. We also practiced using two-syllable words and continuing a decodable story. Lastly, we wrote a short paragraph on our bug research question, “What kind of bug is this? How do you know?”

Math
We wrapped up Unit 2 on Addition and Subtraction within 100. This week we worked on making sense of story problems involving addition and subtraction of 2-digit numbers. We learned how to draw diagrams that represent the relationship between amounts in story problems. We also had a special guest teacher this week, Ms. Montero, our district math coach.

Social Studies
This week we learned about natural resources. We watched a video that showed the different types of natural resources, such as wind, water, sun, rocks, minerals, plants, etc. We learned about the differences between renewable and nonrenewable resources.

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​​Thank you for taking the time to read the update! Please reach out with any questions.

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