Thanksgiving, Publishing Party, and Israel
Celebrating Chanukkah!
Second graders have been preparing for Chanukkah by reading the channukkah story in English and Hebrew, practicing reciting the blessings, and learning our Hebrew lines and dance for the chanukkah play. Students received an early chanukkah present of a dreidel from the PA today at dismissal so that they can play at home on the first night of Chanukkah on Sunday!
Chanukkah Play: Monday, December 10th at 5:15.
If you want a sneak peak of your child’s dance, play them this song and ask them to show it to you!
Publishing Party
Thank you for attending the second grade publishing party! The joy and excitement from both students and parents was radiating throughout the room. We are all so proud of what the second graders have worked towards and accomplished so far this year.
We spent this week in writing finishing up our persuasive writing pieces and illustrating our book covers. While the past few weeks focused on writing our introduction and our supporting reasons, this week was all about ending our writing on a persuasive note! We talked about the role of the conclusion, both as a way to briefly summarize the preceding essay and as a final opportunity to express your point to the reader. We worked on reading our essays emphatically in order to better convince our listeners. Lastly, we talked about what it means to be a good listener, and how important it is to respect the hard work our friends have put into their essays over the past few weeks.
Give your child a compliment for their perseverance!
Sixth Grade Buddies
After the publishing party we had Buddy time. They taught us songs about compost and being green that they learned on their week long trip to Teva. We read our writing pieces to them.
Math
In math we learned how to draw bar models for addition problems, subtraction problems, and problems comparing sets. We practiced figuring out when a problem is an addition problem (solving for the whole) versus a subtraction problem (solving for a part). We read many word problems to learn keywords that help us figure out how to solve the problem, and even made up our own word problems for classmates to solve. We then made sure to review concepts we have learned this year, like number patterns, greater than and less than symbols, addition and subtraction with regrouping, and expanded form. Following this, we began to delve in to our unit on multiplication and division. We learned that multiplication is also called repeated addition, as when we multiply we are adding equal groups over and over.
Draw some pictures of equal groups and have your child count the number of groups, the number in each group, and figure out how many drawings in all. Then, write some multiplication sentences for the problem. You can use food, stickers, toys etc to make tons of awesome multiplication problems!
Social Studies
This week we were busy preparing for Thanksgiving! We read books about the history of Thanksgiving as well as a silly one about the lengths a turkey goes to in order to escape Thanksgiving dinner, called “Turkey Trouble” by Wendy Silvano. We prepared for our very first baking experiment of cornbread by discussing kitchen safety, hygiene, and expectations. Each student took turns measuring, pouring and mixing our delicious cornbread. Then we sliced cranberries and apples, and heated it together with cinnamon to make cranberry sauce. We worked together as a community to make something delicious! As a science connection we used our knowledge about mixtures to add the different ingredients. As a math connection we learned the units of measurement when baking, like cups, tablespoons, and teaspoons.
Check out our bulletin board, where all the disguised turkeys are displayed!
Israel: Map Making and Landing in Tel Aviv
Two weeks ago we took pieces of the map of Israel that we made and looked for geographical clues to figure out which part of the map they are. We pieced the map together and learned the words for the directions in Hebrew. We made Hebrew compass roses.
This week we landed in Tel Aviv and visited Habimah, the national theatre and the beach. At the theatre we played Hebrew charades, and the beach we played backgammon!
Art with Iviva:
We’ve gotten so good at printmaking that Iviva keeps bringing in new materials for us to experiment with. This week, we used pinecones and pineneedles, rolling ink onto them or rolling them in ink and then placing them on top of paper, where we rolled again, transferring the ink to the paper. Some of us realized that the brayers (rollers) could be used like stamps, so we experimented with transferring ink from the brayer alone. While 2–3 of us were printing at one time, the rest of us made Hanukkah cards for people we care about. Make sure to ask us if we brought home a card.
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