We have started a new Social Studies Unit focusing on Work in our Community.  We were so excited to have two local business owners come and talk to second grade.  We met Miss Dalia who owns the business Lollipop Events and Miss Hala who owns Hala's Treats.  We asked these questions:

1. Do you provide goods or services or both? What are they?

2. Do you make your products or are they manufactured somewhere else?

3. If manufactured somewhere else, how do products get to your business?

4. How does your business affect the local community?

5. How do you decide what products and services to provide in our community?

It's snow fun! We have the day off school!

That's right!  It's no fun.  But here are a few activities that will make the day go faster.

Little Bird Tales tutorial:

Mrs LeBlanc's tutorial

Another example from last year:

Aaron's Tale

Welcome 2015!

Second Grade News

Happy 2015!  We wrapped up 2014 with holiday festivities, decorating parties, visiting the holiday bazaar with our senior buddies, and performing in a wonderful holiday concert.  We were busy trying to fit everything in up to the very last day!  Thank you so much for everyone who helped make these holiday events possible.  This is what students enjoy so much about their school experience and adds a 'fun' detour from our daily routines.  

Our science unit is coming to an end.  We will complete the unit with a project where we are going to create a model of an animal dispersing seeds.  This will be a cumulative final project assessing the students' understanding of how seeds are moved across planet earth.  Soon we will begin a new social studies unit digging deeper into our understanding of communities.  

Our Readers Workshop and Writing Workshop took a holiday twist right before break.  We were writing holiday stories and brought in our favorite holiday books to share.  These were great fun to explore all of the different genres of literature and the students were very motivated sharing books they love to read.  The story/poem 'Twas the Night Before Christmas' was quite a hit.  This will be a nice lead into our next unit of study on poetry.  We will begin 2015 studying this genre.    

In math, we are learning so many new strategies to help us add and subtract.  This takes lots of practice!  Story problems are a difficult aspect of mathematics.  They require thorough comprehension and the ability to select important information to solve these types of problems.  We continue to practice these as a whole group, with partners, and individually.  We are learning how to show our work and explain our thinking.     

We have met with our senior buddies twice (sharing our Gratitude Granola in November and shopping at the bazaar in December).  We hope to meet once a month with our new friends.  This has been a positive activity so far and we look forward to our next activity with our buddies. 

We hope you all had a restful and relaxing time with family and friends.  All the second grade teachers a refreshed, relaxed and ready to begin 2015.  It will be another fun packed year of learning and fun!

Ecosystem in Second Grade

Mr Eid came to second grade and talked to us about Ecosystems.  He showed us an ecosystem is n a bottle.  We learned that in an ecosystem all organic life depend on each other.  We are so grateful to Mr Eid!

There was a live fish in the bottle!

November news

Second Grade News:

The past few weeks we have begun to see the connection between living things in ecosystems.  Our science unit is titled: Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems.  We now have focused on how living things depend on each other to continue through their life cycles.  Understanding that plants depend on water and light to grow and plants depend on animals for pollination (or to move their seeds around) are key concepts throughout this unit.

Our Readers Workshop and Writing Workshop units have been integrated with our science unit.  We have focused on reading and comprehending non-fiction text.  We are experts in identifying features and the purpose of those features in non-fiction texts.  We also are researching non-fiction topics of interests and writing non-fiction pieces.  These will be published in the next couple of weeks.  

In math, we are learning so many new strategies to help us add and subtract.  It is great to have multiple ways to solve problems and key to be able to explain how we solved those problems.  We are reading and solving many story problems learning target words to guide us in how to solve the word problem.  

Thinking about gratitude has been a special focus this week.  This is our character trait of the month which connects perfectly to the upcoming holiday, Thanksgiving.  Second graders read a lovely book titled Gratitude Soup where the character learns to appreciate people and experiences versus material objects.  The girl in the story creates a 'soup' filled with her ideas of things she is grateful for.  This week we are going to make 'gratitude granola' sharing what we are most grateful for in our lives.  We have also written letters of appreciation to those people that may be often forgotten and have not had the recognition they deserve!  The homework this week is to create a poster expressing gratitude!   

Too much fun in Second Grade!!

First of all, WELCOME BACK Ms FRAZIER!!  We are all so happy that you have joined us in second grade.  It is so hard to leave such a small baby at home, but we are happy you are here.  

We have finished our wonderful unit on community.  We learned so much about all the different kinds of communities that we are part of. 

This past week we have started a new science unit titled:  Interdependent Relationships in Ecosystems.  We will focus on these essential questions:

What are plants and what are the different structures and functions of the plant parts?

What are seeds and how are seeds dispersed?

How do plants grow?

What are the basic requirements that plants need to grow?

How do different conditions affect plant growth?

What is an ecosystem?

How do living things interact in ecosystems?

How do plants depend on animals for seed dispersion?

How can we make an ecosystem?

What is a habitat?  What are examples of habitats in Jordan?

Our reading and writing unit are connected to our science unit.  Both will focus on Non-fiction texts.  

For math, we have begun a unit on addition and subtraction.  We will build on using multiple strategies to add and subtract.  We will focus on how to explain our thinking verbally, through pictures, through numbers and really 'talk' about problem solving strategies.  

If you have any questions, please feel free to email us.