While Christmas was a nice break from the classroom, I sure did miss all of my students! I had many students tell me all the cool new gifts they got, but one thing they all really shared was getting to spend time with their families! And my heart melted at that moment, as an educator, the family is the most important to my students, and they were all so grateful for that special time, despite Covid still being active.

End of Quarter 2

As we are coming to the end of 2nd quarter, I have seen some tremendous growth among ALL of my students! I can not WAIT to see where the rest of the school year will lead too!

So, with it being the end of quarter 2, we have wrapped up a lot of our units! Onto quarter 3!

Grammar, Reading, Writing, and Phonics

For grammar--, we have finished up our unit on verb tenses! We looked at past tense verbs and how they end in the "ed". We looked at our present tense verbs and how they could end in an "s" or "ing". Then our future tense verbs all had "will" before our verb! We also took a few days to look at irregular verbs and we talked about how they don't follow the same rules as previously mentioned!

This was the video we listened to in class and just danced the whole time!

Reading we have been focusing on different stories and really diving deep into the text structure! We have been working with new vocabulary words, identifying problems and solutions and characters in our stories, and we have been thinking deeper about how the characters respond in our text! We also have a weekly theme that we focus on to help us gain that foundation of our texts! We have read stories about Martin Luther King Jr, Bad Case of Stripes, Invisible Boy, and Duck! Rabbit!.

I still continue to meet in small groups, however, I am grouping them best by their reading ability on RAZ kids, and we focus on skills that they struggle with. So far almost everybody has grown in their reading ability! I can only imagine how much more growth I am going to see!

Writing is one of my favorite things to teach as I love to see how we ALL grow! We will be focusing on these next few weeks are "How To" stories! We are going to focus on what we need to include in our "How To" stories, that they will be bringing home several examples! Enjoy them!

Phonics has been ALL about long vowel sounds with the "magic e" (or how we call it, the Grandma e) rule! The "Grandma e" tells our other vowel to say his name while she remains quiet! This has been a struggle for my students as they hear the sound, and only write the sound, and forget all about "Grandma e". Such as we talk about hope, they hear /h/ /o/ /p/, so that is what they write while listening to the long /o/ sound, and I need them to remember to add that "Grandma e". We are still working on it daily! Next week we will be focusing on long vowel e sounds, which end up being our ee/ea vowels!

Math

We have finished up our unit on adding and subtracting within 100! What that represents is my students can add and subtract 96-30= ? OR 30 + 43=?. They have worked SO hard on this! I have students who use manipulatives, they also use a 100's chart, but they are working so hard on mastering this skill!

One thing to really work on with our students for the rest of the year would be subtraction facts! Any memorization of subtraction facts will make second grade seem like a breeze!

If you are looking for online suggestions, just for some fun, educational games, check out ABCYA or eSpark.app. For eSpark, I actually get to check out what they have been working on! If you are looking for their login, it is their first name and last name, and then password is BEAM.

So for example-my login would be MRSFRIESEN

and my password would be BEAM

Just like that! I do have one student who has a 2 at the end of his name, and his password is BOOT, that is because it would NOT allow me to save his information! If you need help wondering if this is your child, please feel free to email me!

Religion

For religion, we have wrapped up our unit on Forgiveness! We will be working on our next chapter that discusses the importance of our family and our church family!

Science and Social Studies

Science has been a fun two chapters! We looked at the seasons and why we have 4 different seasons! (Hint it is because the Earth is tilted!) These coming weeks we will be looking at different states of matter! (Solid, liquid, and gas) At the end of this lesson, we are going to be having a fun science experiment day and make oobleck!

Social studies will be focusing on Community Economics! So if your child comes home and is demanding payment for their chores, I am truly sorry! We are learning about how we work for an income and earn money to buy things we want and need! We will be focusing on wants and needs and being able to tell the difference!

Check out our last science experiment! We made our own snow using diapers and water! Check out the school's Facebook page to see more fun pictures that Mrs. Cowart took!