Mrs. Bice's Second Grade

Readers Workshop

We had a wonderful time kicking off our next unit of study in Reader’s Workshop: Bigger Books Means Amping Up Reading Power. Readers will learn more about becoming fluent readers and reading like they speak. We practiced scooping words in longer phrases and paying close attention to punctuation. Often, 2nd grade readers take a pause at the end of a line instead of continuing on to the next line. We really focused on the punctuation and not taking a big breathe until the end of the sentence. We also talked about the important of rereading in our heads but also aloud! This can help students to hear themselves and notice when their fluency is lacking. Readers also learned about dialogue tags. A dialogue tag is that tag we see at the end of someone speaking. For example: “We went to the beach!” she shouted. “She shouted” would be the dialogue tag. We learned how important those tags are to the meaning of the sentence and to giving us a hint as to how the text needs to be read! Please work on these strategies with your reader at home to help them to become more fluent!

Phonics Workshop

Phonics Professors had a fun week of looking for camouflaged consonants in the classroom! They went on a hunt searching for those tricky consonants that might be heading in words: kn, ph, gn, wr, soft c, soft g, etc. Help your reader to notice these tricky consonants in their reading at home!

Then we continued to study endings in words. We learned that when a word ends with a silent e, we should drop the e and add -ing! Or if it ends in a silent e and we want to add an -ed, we need to drop the “e” so we don’t have two e’s next door to each other! These tips and tricks were really helpful to these 2nd graders!

Math

We had so much fun this week learning about bar graphs! You probably saw a few data collection sheets and graphs come home this week! We took a break from our math book to fine tune our graphing skills! We graphed gumballs, graphed our “free throw shots”, and created pizzas that we graphed! It was such a fun week of movement, math and graphing! Next week we will jump back into the book!

Empathy

Our morning meetings this week were incredibly meaningful as we focus on empathy. Empathy is such a hard social emotional skill for kiddos but will intentional teaching, it can really hit home! We read a book titled “In Our Shoes” where a little girl puts herself in others shoes throughout the day and sees the impact it has on others! The kids really connected with it and have been so much more intentional with their peers and how others might be feeling. Throughout the week groups worked together to discuss scenarios where they had to decide what they could do to help the person in that situation. An example: your dad comes home super tired from work or a little kid is scared by a mask you are wearing. Kids loved thinking about it from the other persons perspective.

Water Bottles

We are so lucky to have new water bottle filling stations! The school will no longer provide water bottles for students. It is important for every child to bring in a water bottle (especially on PE Fridays). One of their new morning routines will be filling up their bottles. They can keep a bottle in the room for the entire week and then bring it home on Fridays or they can continue to bring it home each day.

Kindness Spirit Week