Mrs. Bice's Second Grade

Readers Workshop

Last week we culminated our 3rd reading unit which had us amping up our reading power by reading stronger and longer books! On Monday we dove head first into our next unit titled: Accelerating Readers Growth in Longer Fictional Books. As we start to wrap up our 3rd quarter in 2nd grade, the readers are reading so much more fluently and stronger since the beginning of the year! The readers will be learning how to navigate through a longer chapter book. This week we learned how to take a sneak peak of a chapter book before we begin. This entails looking at the cover, the blurb on the back and the table of contents. Often times kids jump into a book before truly understanding what the book will be about. Sneak peaks are a great way for kids to gain a better understanding of potential vocabulary they might encounter!

The readers also practiced tracking the characters and the problem in their book. When we read longer books sometimes we get confused by all the characters we meet! One strategy is to keep a post-it in the front cover for each character and when we learn something new, write it on the post it! This strategy has really helped us to remember the characters and how they change throughout the story.

Writer’s Workshop

The writers of room 248 have LOVED our new unit of study titled: Writing Gripping Stories with Meaning and Significance. Writers are learning about the world of realistic fiction and how to make their characters come to life in their stories. We learned that we need to develop a problem and show how the characters persevere to solve the problem! Writers have been working on adding in dialogue and having their characters chat to have their story come to life. We also learned that we want to write stories that keep our reader at the “edge of their seats.”

Math Workshop

Math has really been ramping up as we start to prepare for 3rd grade! Mathematicians have been working with two step word problems! Students are learning to persevere and figure out how solve AND check the multi step word problems. We have been working on using base-10 blocks, decomposing addends into expanded form, partial sums, and using an open number line to solve for the sum. All of these strategies are creating a great foundation for students to understand how place value is connected to adding and subtracting bigger numbers.

Science

Solids, liquids and gases oh my! This week we continued to explore with matter through experiments. We conducted an experiment put pop rocks inside a bottle of Coke to see if it would blow up a balloon. Our predictions were correct! The carbon dioxide from the pop rocks mixed with the carbon dioxide from the Coke to fill the balloon up! This morning we made ice cream

Self Management: Mindfulness

This week we spoke about stress and the effect it has on our body! Students talked about the stresses they face as 2nd graders and how we can handle that stress is positive ways. We also learned about “mindfulness” and the impact it can have on our self talk and managing our behaviors. Check out this great video we watched on mindfulness in kids. Next week we will continue to practice mindfulness and ways to management ourselves in positive ways.

Book Orders

All book orders need to be place by tonight! I will be placing the order tomorrow morning! Please use this link if you would like to order your child any books! It is a great (and cheap) way to build up “just right” books in your home library!

Whales Tales

If you haven’t already, please turn in your child’s (pink) Second Grade Whale Tales Advisory Slip!