Don't forget that this Friday (May 3rd) is our nonfiction publishing party! (Please check your email if you haven't checked it in a while.) The students are very excited to show you what they've been working on.
Here's what we were working on in the classroom last week:
Reading : Continuing on in our visualization and inferencing unit, we worked hard this week to infer the meaning poems. I left the title off poems to force the students to use the authors' words to create visualizations in their heads, by which they could infer what the author was talking about. They loved being 'reading detectives' and trying to figure out the poems' meanings. All of the poems we worked on are in your child's binder. I'm sure your child would love to see if you could figure out what some of the poems mean. (Just ask your child first so he/she can cover up and words or clues he/she may have written.)
Writing : The students' nonfiction all about books are almost done! The students have worked so hard on them. Last week we added captions and labels to our pictures and created glossaries. Hopefully you will get a chance to come to our publishing party on Friday!
Math : We kicked off unit 8 last week by learning about dollars. We practiced counting money and spent time doing word problems with money involved.
**A few times last week, I had the students adding double digit numbers to solve word problems. In school, they learn about many different strategies that they can use to solve these problems. The students may use their number grids, they may draw base-ten blocks for each number and then count them altogether, they may draw tally marks for each number and then count them altogether, or they may draw coins out for each number and count them altogether. I have not taught them to stack the numbers on top of each other, then to add the ones, and then the tens. This will certainly come up as a strategy in second grade, but if you would like to teach it to your child now, by all means do so.
Word Study : We learned all about nouns last week. Ask your child what a noun is!
Have a great week!
Here we are in the Discovery Lab: