Mrs. Bice's Second Grade

Author’s Celebration

We had a wonderful time yesterday celebrating our writing at our culminating Author’s Celebration! This week writers spent time revising, editing and publishing one piece of their writing. Writers all wrote nonfiction books but everyone had a choice on how they wanted to create their books. Some of the writers wrote how to books, chapter books, or even question and answer books. Tuesday, your child will bring home their published piece of writing, the rest of the writing from the unit and a rubric. I use the rubric to assess where they are at as a writer. Not only do I look at their published piece but I also look through their writing from the unit in case their final writing doesn’t showcase where they are as a writer in informational writing.

Our celebration began with the author’s reading their stories around campfires to their peers. After each child shared, the other author’s gave them compliments. To culminate the celebration we had “s’mores cereal” and an apple juice toast. Overall writers felt empowered, proud and stronger than ever as an author and illustrator!

Reader’s Workshop

This week we began a unit titled: bigger Books Means Amping Up Our Reading Power. We will be working on reading fluently as readers! We want our reading to sound just like we are talking! Sometimes it helps to some something aloud first and then read in the same way in your head. Readers also practiced scooping words into bigger phrases.

Science

This week we continued our unit about how water shapes the earth’s surface. Our second lesson was called, “Why is there sand at the beach?” We learned how rivers can be powerful enough to carry rocks and slam them into each other, breaking them into smaller and smaller pieces along the way. Next week we will continue to learn about water, erosion and landslides.

Math Workshop

Mathematicians are so excited to come to workshop every day! They have been so excited about our routines and procedures in math workshop. I wanted to give you a sneak peek into our Workshop so you have a better sense of how things are structured. When students walk into workshop there is a math talk or warm up for the day. This helps students to think, strategize and talk about math strategies. The math talk could be as simple as 18 + 12. When students have one solution they show one finger. Then as they find more and more ways to mentally solve it, they show more fingers. Then students are asked to share their solutions with the class and we record all the ways we could mentally solve this! It could be “I moved 2 ones from 12 over to the 8 because I know that 2 + 8= 10. Then I added 20 plus 10 and I knew that was 30.” Another student might say “I added the tens first. 10 plus 10 =20. Then I added 2 + 8 which is 10 and then I added 20 + 10.” The mathematicians surprise me every day and come up with amazing ways to group numbers and solve things mentally.

Then we move into a short mini lesson teaching a mathematical concept for the day. Once we finish, the students move into 4 different rotations throughout the class: Teacher Table, Partner Practice, Game, Independent Work. I pre-test before each unit to know which students can be challenged and which will need extra support during the unit. Students are then grouped based on their needs. I may have one group working on triple digit adding, while another group is working on skip counting to help with their adding mentally of two digit numbers.

Overall, Math Workshop has been a ton of fun with hands on learning, differentiation and collaborating with each other! This week students learned about open number lines as a way to add double (some groups we focused on triple) digit numbers! We also learned how to make change up to $1.00. This is a VERY difficult skill for 2nd graders. Please try to practice at home as much as possible! We will continue to work on it during the school but it is a skill that needs a lot of practice for mathematicians to become confident in!

Social Emotional Learning

In morning meetings this week we continued to learn about growth mindset. We read several books about changing our mindset from “I can’t.” to “I can’t do that YET!” The power of “yet” is a huge mindset shift that we can really help the kids learn from an early age. Please encourage your child to use this language at home when they encounter a difficult task!

We also learned more about Martin Luther King Jr. and the impact he had on the past, present and future of the world. Students enjoyed learning about such an influential person and how important it is to use your words to make a change!

Day of Service

Meadow Brook students and staff will celebrate the accomplishments of MLK, Jr. by participating in a special “Day of Service” on Valentine’s Day, Friday, February 14, 2020. This day will wrap up a full week of focus on kindness and “All Are Welcome,” our school theme. We will use this day to partner with Kids Food Basket to assemble, prepare, and load as many bags of trail mix as possible to help children affected by hunger right here in our local community, and even within our school. From now through February 13, 2020, we are seeking food donations in preparation for our Day of Service learning. Students will also be decorating bags for the Kids Food Basket organization, incorporating the learning that will be front-loaded in their classrooms. Please bring items to school at any time and place them in the bins/boxes outside classrooms and inside the front doors of school. The following items are needed: large containers of raisins, bags of small pretzel twists, Cheerios (original and plain only- off brand okay), and cheese crackers (goldfish or cheezits work best).

Valentine’s Day

We will have a short but sweet Valentine’s Day Party on Friday, February 14 from 2:50-3:45. Feel free to come and help out at the party! Students will also pass out Valentine’s in the morning. Your child may (but does not have to) bring in Valentine’s for their peers. I will attach our class roster to my weekly email, and send a hard copy home! We have spoken a lot about gratitude this year so I am hoping the students can think of Valentine’s Day as a day to show others gratitude and how thankful we are for their friendship!

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