Week of March 26th, 2012

Happy Spring Break!

I hope you're all doing something very relaxing.  Enjoy the week off!

Reminder: I am hoping to attend some of the students' extra curricular functions.  Feel free to send me any dates or schedules for anything your student may be participating in before the end of the school year!

This week we...

Literacy:

Writing: We continue to work on poetry.  This week we learned about a few more types of figurative language.  We read Animalia and The Z was Zapped to learn about alliteration and heard a few poems in which it was used.  Then we wrote cinquain poems where we were able to practice alliteration, as well as metaphors, similes and onomatopoeia (all of which we learned about last week).  We also learned about personification.  We read the book The House Takes a Vacation and I read aloud a few poems which use personification and everyone had to guess based on the usage of personification what object the poem was about.  Then we wrote Colors of the Season poems in which we all used personification (and any other figurative language devices we chose to include as well).  We were even able to read some poems aloud together and in partners.

Reading: We finished our mystery genre book club books.  Many were shocked to find out the result of the mystery within their respective books.  Students did a fantastic job choosing to either identify a prediction or an inference and determine the difference between the two reading strategies.

Word Study:  This week we worked on homonyms.  This will greatly help us in our conventions when we are writing.

Math:

This week we started our money mini unit.  The money unit is super fun because it can be applied to real life.  We played a money memory game to review the values of coins, we learned how to add money by adding together the items on my (Ms. Koeble's) grocery store list and then played a game in which each letter of the alphabet was assigned a money value and the students needed to add up the values to figure out who had the most expensive name.  Then students challenged themselves to try to find the most expensive word.  The most expensive word we discovered was found by Luke P and it was our poetry term, onomatopoeia!  We continued to work on problem solving journals and then learned about how to make change.  Some people even had time to play "Making Change" war in which students flipped two cards and had to find how much change they would receive.  Whomever received more change kept all four cards.  It was a really fun week in math!

 Social Studies:

We were able to present our U.S. History time lines this week!  Everyone did a FANTASTIC job and worked really hard!  We are all very proud of everyone.  

Extra:

We got to look at and make observations about our plants from science.

 We got kind of silly writing all over the board last Friday!

 We celebrated Maya's birthday with a yummy cake and cupcakes!

 Our class made it in the newspaper!  Awesome!

I hope everyone has a safe, relaxing and fun week off!

Week of March 19th, 2012

Happy First Weekend of Spring!

(even though it has felt like it much longer!)

Reminder: I am hoping to attend some of the students' extra curricular functions.  Feel free to send me any dates or schedules for anything your student may be participating in before the end of the school year!

Since last week was such a picture heavy post and we had a shorter week this week, this post will be a bit shorter.  I do have some exciting "out of school" pictures to share at the end of the post though!

Literacy:

Reading:  This week we continued with our mystery genre book club books.  Everyone continues to do a good job coming prepared to discuss the book as well as making great predictions and inferences.  Since we are doing book clubs, only Independent Reading Journal logs are due on Wednesdays.  Writing an entry would be considered extra credit.

Writing: We continued our poetry unit this week by learning about metaphors and similes and how to incorporate them into our writing.  We wrote sensory poems that utilized either a metaphor, simile or both within it.  We also learned about onomatopoeia and alliteration and included these in our shape poems and cinquain poems.  Due dates to have poem drafts completed are always in their planners.

Word Study:  This week we did compound words.  We use compound words a lot more than we think we do!

Math: This week we took a break from fractions to complete some state-wide assessments.  We did get a chance to fit in some problem solving involving fraction story problems!  Students have a great grasp on this concept.  We will be moving onto money next week and will continue to do so until after spring break.

Social Studies:  We finished up our U.S. History Timeline posters this week and we are planning our presentations now.  We hope to present them next week.  They did a fantastic job!

Learning Buddies:  This week we made books about spring with our second grade learning buddies.  Our class does so well allowing our buddies to have a lot of say in our projects but also putting their own spin on it as well!

Extra: I had the chance to do two fun things outside of school this weekend!  I was able to attend the school dance AND see Kayla Irish dance on St. Patrick's Day.  It was a fun weekend!

Have a great week!!