Good old fun with salt and flour!

Come see your favorite teachers from Ivy Dance!

The snow has arrived!!

Everyone is excited that there is finally some snow to play in. As our snow falls accumulate, please send your second grader with boots, snow pants, a hat and mittens so they can play in the snowy fields. Extra socks might be a good idea as well just incase snow finds its way into their boots.

                                           

Welcome Back!

It sounded like everyone had a wonderful winter break. I was so excited to come back and see all those smiling faces this morning.
We are going to have a busy week getting back into the routine of second grade.

We have had a very busy two weeks since Thanksgiving!  Our salt and flour continent maps look wonderful! We owe a huge thank you to all of the moms who came in and helped!

Room 152 has been busy learning!
In Reading: We continue to focus on story elements and summarizing stories by choosing the important events that occurred in the beginning, middle and end. The students are using a variety of graphic organizers to demonstrate their mastery of summarizing. We have also continued to learn about synonyms, homophones, what a thesaurus is, as well as how to use a dictionary. Through this coming week, we will continue to practice these skills.

Spelling: There will be no assigned Spelling City this coming week. I still encourage the students to go on to the site and play any game that they enjoy for additional practice. Our regular Spelling City assignments will resume after Winter Break.

In Math: We will finish Unit 4 this week. This unit included building mental math addition strategies, temperature and different number story models. I will be doing a review in class on Wednesday over all of the material that will be on this unit's test.

In Social Studies: Our maps are looking awesome! To fully wrap up this landforms unit, this week we will use our elevation keys to paint the salt and flour maps.

In Writing: The students are almost done with their second large writing piece, their personal narratives. Last week's lessons including more work with dialogue and choosing spicy words to make our writing more interesting. We also worked on how to bring a story to a nice ending that is complete and clear but not abrupt.

Upcoming Events:
Tuesday: All school pajama day!
Thursday: Math Test!
Friday: Our "Walking Towards Good Behavior" Party!
Also On Friday: The 1st and 5th Grade Show!

What are you thankful for?

With Thanksgiving so quickly approaching we want to keep everyone in our thoughts. Please watch the two cute commercials the 1st graders put together about Ivy Hill's food drive going on now!

Click -> Mrs. Bedingfield's Food Drive Video

Click-> Mrs. Tazi's Food Drive Video

Important events this week:

Tuesday: Miss Rosenthal will be out for a meeting (just for the morning)

Thursday: In the morning we will be taking our first field trip to Hersey High School to see a wonderful play. Please send permission slips and the $5.50 fee as soon as possible!

Friday: Report cards will go home!

Looking Back: October 31st- 4th

Our week, last week, was kicked off by a wonderfully scary Halloween. I know my favorite part was the the story about Hal O'Ween. Thank you so very much to all of our parent helpers who planned such a fantastic party for our class. 

What happened in....

Reading: Last week we read a pretty funny story about mice getting into trouble. Little Henry took his sister's magic colored pencils and whatever he drew on the wall came to life. So you can only imagine what happened next. Ask you second grader to summarize last weeks story; also ask them what genre the story fits under and why.

We continue to work on our mental images, so last week students drew their mental images for our vocabulary words. It seems as though the favorite word last week was 'civilized'. Everyone was very quick to point out when we were acting in a civilized manner.

Last week we also completed a short auditory reading practice. I read a story and the students had four questions they were to answer after the story was read.

Math: We continue to practice exchanging coins for equivalent amounts. I encourage you to practice at home with your second grader playing banker. To play: have your student exchange maybe 1 dollar (any money amount) for an equal amount of money using different coins. This will help them identify the coins faster and with more accuracy as well as practice equivalent money values. 

We also dove back into telling time. Everyone is really improving in this area. The more practice students get seeing analog clocks the easier telling time will be for them.

Lastly, we combined many of our lessons for additional practice into 5 centers that we began on Friday and finished up today. Students made clock books, worked with Geo-boards, solved number puzzles, practiced place value using base 10 blocks and practiced their addition and subtraction skills through a game.

Writing: We continue to work on our Narrative pieces. We learned last week how to improve our stories beginning by adding details about the setting, characters as well as how to add in a super starter to hook the readers attention. During writing we came up with a picture that would help us remember how we structure a piece of writing. The picture that we drew out was a hamburger. Each part of the hamburger represents something important that makes are writing great.


LMC (our computer lab lesson time): This week in the LMC we took a break from our landform research and learned all about internet safety. This seemed to be many people's favorite activity of the week according to our weekly reflection sheets. After watching a video we brainstormed together rules that could help us be safe while using the internet. We came up with rules like- never give out your password, never give out your information, and never download anything without permission. The kids then took those rules and created an adorable Comic Life poster with their picture and two rules. These will be on display in the classroom and then sent home. I was so impressed with how everyone tackled the technology and produced such creative posters.

Looking Ahead:

Wednesday: This is a flip day. That means it will really be a Friday schedule because we will be missing school on Friday.

**Please bring your library books back by Wednesday as we will check out new books then.**

Friday: No School - Veterans Day!