Mrs. Bice's Second Grade

Reader’s Workshop

We had a great week in reader’s workshop! We finished our unit titled “2nd Grade Readers Can Grow Word Solving Muscles!” this week. The unit ended with us using our snap words to read fluently and finding ways to have our reading sound powerful. I including the chart below to show you how we can sound like a reading star!

Towards the end of the week, we have focused on fluency! Often, we find that 2nd graders lack fluency because they might be working so hard at decoding, that they are lacking fluency. We looked deeper into punctuation and reading with expression. We went over some of the most common types of punctuation and their purpose. When we see a “,” what should we do? When you read with your child, please be sure to have them pay close attention to punctuation! Readers also had a ton of run playing “roll and emotion.” Readers rolled a die and read a sentence based on the emotion they rolled. Some of their favorites were reading angry, gloomy, and excited!

Next week we will begin our next unit of study in readers workshop. This unit is titled: Second Grade Reading Growth Spurt. As many of you have started to notice, your 2nd grade reader is starting to hit a growth spurt with their reading! Please watch this parent video (u/n: bice248 pw: family) to get an idea of what we will be working on and ways to help your child at home.

Writer’s Workshop

Poetry has been so much fun in room 248! Students started to write poems not just about objects but things/topics they have strong feelings about and providing details! Poets also started editing their poems to look for uppercase letters, the spelling of words, etc. Poetry is tricky to edit because students become so concerned with the flow of their poem, that they forget about the fundamentals of writing! Writers also looked for ways to make their poems even better by adding in repetition and using honest and precise words so our poems sound like 2nd grade poems!

Math

We kicked off the week with a pre-assessment for unit 3 so I could see what the students knew prior to beginning our unit! Today I am sending home a unit 3 Family Letter that will explain some of the concepts that we will be working on during the next unit. There are some great “anytime” activities and games included that would be great for your child to do at home. There are also some fact triangles included. Your child has a set of these cards in the classroom but I have also included a set for them to use at home. These are GREAT for building fact fluency and increasing your child’s number sense.

Unit 3 began with us talking about fact families and related facts! Related facts are addition and subtraction facts that use the same numbers. Example: 2+3= 5, 3+2=5, 5-3=2 and 5-2=3. We will continue to build fact fluency throughout the year learning how numbers are related.

Growth Mindset

This week we learned about the power of “YET!” It is so important for students to think of things they are not able to do right now and think to themselves, “I can not do that yet!” Studies show that when students have a growth mindset from early on in their learning career, the more likely they are to accept challenges and persevere through difficult topics, situations or problems. Please encourage your child to think of the power of “yet” and praise their hard work on the process, their resilience, effort, strategies, and improvement!

Election

We had so much fun learning about the election process and how it all works. The class loved creating their voter id card and using it to vote for our favorite character! The week leading up to the election we read “Grace For President”,” Sofia Valdez, Future Prez,” “Duck for President,” and “My Teacher for President.” On Tuesday the kids voted and filled out their ballots! They all received an “I voted” sticker and proudly wore it as a badge of honor! We also took a peek at the electoral college and the map of the states. The students LOVED looking at the map and learning about the process. As always, I asked for only facts and when we talk about politics in 2nd grade we only use facts :)