Wow!  It is hard to believe that we are entering our last week in January! :O. Where does the time go?  The weather continues to be crazy!  Please make sure that your second graders are prepared for the cold!  Many of them have been coming in with freezing ears and fingers!  We are hoping to get a little snow, so that the children can access different parts of the playground, that have been covered in a sheet of ice, and maybe even get to use some of those new sleds, again!  Thank you again for the donations of soft tissues and disinfecting wipes!  We are flying through them!  We have had so many runny noses and coughs in the classroom, that we have been sanitizing non-stop!  We even had the children wipe down their pencils!  Hoping that some of them can get some relief, soon!

 

I will be submitting the book order by the end of the month, so if you are planning to order something, please get your order in soon!  I have built a nice long list of requests, and am excited to get it submitted!  These kiddos LOVE to read!

 

Last week in Wonders, we continued to work on long vowel patterns.  There were some tricky ones, but the children did quite well!  We read all about communities, and about citizenship.  We ended the week by reading a narrative nonfiction story, about a man that has too many books, and shares them with the neighborhood children.  The children seemed to really enjoy this story, and this jump-started a conversation about what they can do to help out in their communities!  We also continued to work on contractions.

 

In math, we continued to practice telling time, but the five minute mark, this time!  The children have made some nice progress with this, but this is certainly an area that we will continue to practice!  We also started to explore place value to the hundreds place, with base ten blocks.  Some groups, even began to add with base ten as a foundation.  We will continue to work on representing numbers in base ten, and solidifying our understanding of place value.

 

We rounded the week off with a quick stem, which involved some critical thinking!  The children tried to create snowflakes with certain attributes.  For example, they tried to create a snowflake with a hole in the middle, or 12 sides.  This was a fun task, which turned out to be trickier than the children had expected!  We will be moving on to learning about different states of matter, in the upcoming weeks!  I am excited for some fun STEAM activities in this unit!