Hello Families and Friends!
Can you believe March is halfway over and we only have about 45 days of school left? This year has flown by for us here in 2B!
We completely enjoyed our Love of Reading Week! Thank you to all of the parent volunteers who helped make it so special for us! Highlights: meeting two published authors – Stephanie Permain & Chris Gall, decorating our classroom door together, visiting the book fair, and reading to service dogs. What a great week to celebrate the gift of books and reading!
Chris Gall
Stephanie Permain
Did you hear about our leprechaun hunt last week? Daniel O’Murphy left clues all over the school for us to find which led us to a special treasure!
Nobody was getting pinched on my watch!
Eating the cookies Danny Boy left for us!
Reading
“How do living things depend on each other?” That is the big question we are exploring in our new reading unit. To answer it, we are reading, writing, and talking about the partnerships some plants and animals form in order to survive. “Go to Sleep, Gecko!” by Margaret Read MacDonald is a cute folk tale where a gecko learns how much his survival depends on other animals in the forest. “Enric Sala: Marine Ecologist” by Kristin Cozort is an article where the author describes the work of Explorer Enric Sala, who studies coral reefs and the many creatures that depend on them. Ask your child about each of those books! Some new vocabulary words we have been reading, using in our writing, and looking up in the dictionary are: accept, connect, necessary, relate, roles, and vegetation.
Spelling/Language
We have been studying the short O sound spelled oo, ea, au, and aw. I am pleased to see that more and more students are remembering these odd spellings that we study week-to-week in our spelling packets. That’s the whole point! Not to mention that the students are also becoming more aware of these spellings when they view them while reading. We have also been working hard on using the rules of hyphenation. We are continuing to talk about subjects and predicates as well as present tense and past tense verbs. In addition, we studied the prefixes un, re, and mis along with the suffixes -y, -ly,and -ful.
Writing
We had a couple of big weeks full of Irish writing. We started writing some fabulous leprechaun adventure stories. From start to finish of the writing process, these have taken the students a longer time than normal because their stories are becoming more and more detailed – and I’m way ok with that!!
We also learned how to write limericks! From the rhymes to the beats in each line, these are some entertaining poems to write. This has now become the students’ favorite type of poetry to write!
Mathematics
We have been continuing work on adding and counting within 100 and 1,000 through workbook pages and partner games. Story problems, including comparison problems with a larger unknown, and story problems with more than one step have been our major focus during this past week. The students have focused on developing efficient and accurate strategies for adding larger numbers, specifically those that involve adding hundreds, tens, and ones and having to regroup.
By now, the students know that telling time is an essential skill in their lives. Telling time allows them to relate the duration of an event in their daily routines to reading a clock. These applications provide a purpose for telling time and keeping track of the duration of an event. With the short hand, we tell the hour and approximate how close we are to the next one by where it is pointing. With the long hand, we focus on the distance traveled to tell the duration in minutes since the last hour, and how long until the next hour. We have practiced using the terms “half past” and “quarter past/til.” If the kiddos don’t have an analog watch or clock, I’m putting it on their wish list!
Social Studies
We have practiced identifying geographic features and locating them on a physical map. We also practiced drawing the different geographic features on our own physical maps to show understanding. We have been studying about all of the different landforms/water forms that are found on earth, too. Lots of new vocabulary words…maybe to look up in the dictionary at home? (ocean, river, lake, bay, island, canyon, peninsula, hill, mountain, valley, plain, volcano, plateau, desert, glacier, delta, isthmus, waterfall, and cave)
Science with Ms. O
A new science unit is about to commence: air and weather! So far, we have discussed the interactions of air, water, and energy which we call “weather.” Weather is more than windstorms, but weather is always directly or indirectly something going on with, or in, the air. We will practice being meteorologists by observing the day’s weather and notating it in our weather journals! We will also be discussing all of the different types of cloud formations.
Teaching Time
Check out all the cool things the kids have been teaching about:
Ralph – Charles Lindbergh, leopard geckos
Hayden – trees, sharks
Edrich – the sun, lightning
Harper – how to draw a brick wall, Big City Greens
Andrew – how to skateboard, snowboarding
Elena – glass, mirrors
Nora – calico cats, Ireland
Hazel – mythical creatures, her brother
J.J. – Pokemon, claw machines
Neelan – Iditarod, St. Patrick’s Day in NYC
Caitlyn – lemurs, crystals
Anukriti – mold, Holi
Zayla – clownfish, drawing lesson
Quinn – Babysitter’s Club books, A Wrinkle in Time
Kaden – porcupines, St. Patrick’s Day
Important Dates:
April 11-15: Easter Break
Have a nice weekend! I am sending this out a day early because I will be staying home with my little boy tomorrow who is feeling a bit under the weather. Mrs. Sandy Schultz, former 3rd grade teacher at St. Mike’s for YEARS, will be my substitute.
Thank you,
Annie
Anukriti winning a Move-a-thon award!
Elena winning a Move-a-thon award!
Such sweet pups!