Hello Families and Friends of 2B!
Here we are, only 14 days left together in 2B. Hard to believe, I know.
We would like to wish you all a very special Mother’s Day and hope you love the little gifts we made for you!
Weren’t the kids adorable at their Spring Show today? Great job to everyone!
Our end of the year party is quickly approaching. We will be having a water slide party in our park with the other 2nd grade class on Wednesday, May 25th. The students will be allowed to have free dress that day: they will need some sort of water wear, and a change of dry clothes as well. The students will enjoy a lunch, some sweet treats, and a few other surprises. Thank you to Hazel’s mom, Helen, for helping us make this party possible!
The kindergarteners, first, and second graders were lucky enough to jump on buses and go on a fun field trip last week to see the Tucson Symphony Orchestra. They introduced us to different orchestral instruments and played some really great familiar pieces that the students loved! This concert reignited my lifelong desire to be part of an orchestra…not as a piano soloist, but as an orchestra member! So I have decided to take up either the violin, cello, or the clarinet. Let’s see what kind of a music student I will be as an adult – haha!
Bus ride!
Beautiful auditorium Reading
We finished our reading and language arts series with a few great selections about what makes our country GREAT! “America Is. . .” by Louise Borden discusses the customs, symbols, celebrations, and landmarks that make up the national identity of the United States. “This Land Is Your Land,” words and music by Woody Guthrie, were accompanied by explorer Sam Abell’s photos of the United States which, combined with these song lyrics, express this man’s love of the unique American landscape. Some of the words we have been using in sentences, reading about, and looking up in the dictionary are: freedom, immigrant, landform, monument, seek, state, symbol, and united.
The next couple of weeks, we will do some fun book club activities during our language arts time. Get ready for some fun reading adventures!
Spelling and Language
We have been working with the -ent and -ant endings as in the words ‘talent’ and ‘recent.’ We also discussed how to tell where to divide these types of words into syllables. Next week, our spelling list will consist of words that have been most commonly misspelled by the students throughout the year.
We have been practicing dissecting sentences for the following things: subject, predicate, adjectives, and prepositional phrases. The kids now know exactly what I mean when I say “write a complete sentence!” No excuses any more 🙂
Writing
The students were eager to share the nature myths that they wrote with each other. I will send those home to you very soon.
Since we have been reading and writing about our great nation, we decided it would be fun to write about a place we know well: Arizona! We came up with our own lists of things unique to our state. This list was easy for the students to create as so much of our social studies and science this year revolved around our unique desert environment. Then we wrote our own Arizona state anthems/poems/facts using these ideas. We finished off our good drafts by coloring an Arizona flag on the back (personally I think our state has the coolest flag out of all the states!).
What would you do if you had the power of invisibility? Ask your child to see the paragraph writing project he or she completed last week. All I can say is….some of these kids are SNEAKY! Read your child’s paragraph to see what I’m talking about!
Mathematics
We are pushing through our entire math curriculum! Over the past few weeks the students have been solving comparison problems with a smaller unknown, playing games that involved subtracting amounts from 100 or one dollar, and solving story problems with a focus on developing efficient and accurate strategies for subtracting 2 and 3 digit numbers with regrouping (borrowing).
Social Studies
We have just started a new unit on how goods are produced and distributed. In small groups, we created a simple toy car using assembly-line techniques and learned that most goods and products we use and buy are produced by teams in factories. We learned that using assembly lines and good teamwork strategies including effective communication and job distribution, all make the job easier and quicker! We will continue to research how goods are moved from the factory to the store.
Assembly lines!Science with Ms. O
We continued our weather study by doing more weather journaling. We will be learning about the 4 most common types of clouds: cirrus (the thin wispy ones), stratus (the blanket covering the entire sky ones), cumulous (the giant puffy white ones) and cumulonimbus (the big gray poofy raincloud ones).
Teaching Time
Check out all the cool things the kids have been teaching us all about:
Ralph – Colorado, his dad’s surgery
Hayden – how to draw butterflies,
Edrich – motorcycles, Pima County Fair
Harper – gymnastics, mochi
Andrew – scooter tricks, baseball
Elena – Shedd Aquarium, rattlesnakes
Nora – pikas, Kirby
Hazel – how to draw a bee
J.J. – how ipads work, Glamrock Freddy
Neelan – archery, how to ride scooters
Caitlyn – dolphins, I Lost My Tooth book report
Anukriti – evolution, flying squid
Zayla – how to draw Kirby, hiccups
Quinn – Abe Lincoln, ant lions
Kaden – J.K. Rowling, Yellowstone National Park
Important Dates:
Wednesday, May 11th: 11:50 dismissal
Friday, May 20th: Relaxed dress day, Art Expo, evening time
Have a wonderful weekend and Happy Mother’s Day!
Annie
Last round of Renaissance testing done!