11/11/22

Dear Second Grade Families,

It is hard to believe that November is already here! We really enjoyed meeting with you at conferences to share the wonderful work the children are doing in class!

 

Reading:

In reading we have been learning that second grade readers roll up their sleeves and get to work upon encountering tricky words. We built on decoding strategies and learned that readers often use many strategies at a time. If your child has a difficult time figuring out a difficult word at home, these are our strategies:

Look through the whole word part by part

Use vowel teams and ask, “Would a different sound help?”

Use what’s happening in the story

Look for words inside of words

Check the pictures and see what would make sense

Reread and ask, “Does that sound right?”

Don’t give up – try and try again!

 

Writing:

The second graders are officially published authors! We have gone through the process of prewriting, drafting, revising and editing stages with our narrative pieces. They worked on including interesting leads, strong endings, powerful language, dialogue and stretching the story across many pages! Our writers  also spent time on capitalization, ending punctuation, spelling our snap words too. Finally, we added a thoughtful cover with capitalized titles and beautiful illustrations! During our celebration,  our authors each had a chance to sit in the Author’s Chair and read their stories, while the audience gave compliments and took questions as authors do as well. We finished it all with a Martinelli’s sparkling cider toast!  

 

Social Studies:

We began our study on landforms and have been busy identifying physical characteristics and taking notes about mountains, canyons, and volcanoes! Next week, we will be discussing plains, hills, and deserts, and finally rivers, marshes, and waterfalls. We used our bodies to imitate tectonic plates shifting within Earth’s crust to create landforms, and we have learned some fun facts about the highest mountains and longest volcanic eruptions. Ask your child which landform they find the most interesting and why!

 

Science: 

The past two weeks of science class have focused on the three states of matter and the changes that can occur in the world around us. Students are learning about how the properties of matter can change based on how the external environment around them changes, notably a rise or drop in temperature. We are also learning how to use the technical terms freezing, melting, evaporating, and condensing to describe how matter changes from one state to another. During our investigations, students dissolved alka seltzer tablets in water (creating a mini ¨explosion,¨ as they put it) and recorded observations about the water´s changing properties. They also experimented with ways to melt ice cubes in plastic bags quickly by adding heat; some students broke apart the ice, blew on their bag, warmed it in their hands using tissues, and rubbed it on the rug to create friction!

 

Math:

In math, the students have been working hard on their multi-digit subtraction skills. We have been using the following jingle to help our mathematicians:

“More on Top, don’t stop! More on the floor, go next door and get 10 more. The numbers the same Zero is your game.”

 Students have also been using manipulatives to visualize what regrouping is and means. This will give them a visual and firm understanding of the concepts as we move toward the abstract and algorithm.

 

Hebrew and Judaics:

In Judiac studies, we learned about the Ethiopian holiday Sigd and how the Jewish Ethiopian Jews celebrating Sigd in Ethiopia and in Jerusalem in the month of Heshvan: fasting, walking to a mountain in Jerusalem, holding colorful umbrellas, and praying. We also started working on our Chumash book and learning about the world’s creation.

In Hebrew, we continued to improve our reading skills and started learning a new structure of sentences: I have and I don’t have יש לי אין לי to enrich our verbal and writing skills. 

 

Music:

In Music class, Second Graders have been reviewing Solfège and major, minor and pentatonic scales. They have been reviewing reading rhythms. They have also reviewed our rhythm stick protocol and played different beats through our rhythm stick call and response game.

 

STEAM:

STEAM is back! Now that the Jewish holidays are over, we are able to have our once-a-week class again. I’m so thrilled to be back with the 2nd graders! The main purpose of our classes is to expand on the science curriculum they learn with Veronica. Over the last two weeks, we have taken a deeper dive into matter to try to really understand what matter is. In the first class, we talked about the properties of matter and all the different forms of matter that exists. Students then did a scavenger hunt for matter, finding items that had different properties such as rough, heavy, and pointed.

This week, we started to zoom in on matter on an atomic level. We discussed how all matter is made up of tiny particles called molecules and that molecules are made up of even smaller particles called atoms. We thought about sand and how when you are far away, it looks like one large mass. When you are closer, you can see that it is really made of lots of particles of sand. We also took a look at pointillism paintings by Georges Seurat. These paintings are created with lots of tiny dots of paint. When you are close up you can see the dots and how no two colors are mixed together. When you are further away, your brain mixes colors together and creates shapes to form beautiful paintings. Just like atoms come together to form molecules and molecules come together to form larger pieces of matter! Finally, we started to work on our own pointillism art. Check out to photos to see the STEAM artists at work!

 

Art:

In art, we are continuing to strengthen our drawing skills. This week, we practice shading by making very light, medium and dark marks with our pencils. We learned how to change the way we hold our pencils so that we can press more lightly or harder. We also learned about lines, and created designs with as many different kinds of lines as we could imagine. 

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