Dear Parent(s), I am hoping to include the weekly homework grid here each week to assist you in making the homework routine as easy as possible. Thanks so much for all your support. Have a great weekend, Ms. Collins
Dear Parent(s),
This week we went on a field trip to see a pow wow at the Old Towne School of Music. At the beginning of the pow wow, we saw the person put sage smoke all over everything. He said it was to bring positive energy to the pow wow. We saw a Junior fancy dance dancer. The dancers wore their regalia. We heard cool flute music that sounded like birds. There was also a really loud drum. Some of the feathers that made up their regalia came from turkeys, eagles, and geese. One of the dancers was from the Lakota tribe. And Ms. Collins talks about that tribe often so we were most familiar with that tribe as a class. On the same day of the pow wow, we visited our fifth grade buddies in Ms. Young's class. We made turkeys together. We had to solve math problems to glue the feathers onto our turkeys. We took our unit 3 math test this week. It was pretty hard. In writing workshop, we are researching and writing about famous people.We are working in groups. We picked the person we wanted to research. Some of us are researching Jane Goodall, Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Eli Manning, Helen Keller, Pele, Harry Houdini, and Frida Kahlo. The drafts we will be writing are called biographies. We had an awesome dance party, Mannequin style. We danced in the hallway and in the classroom. We were celebrating earning lots of class hoots as a school! Sincerely, Ms. Collins' class Dear Parent(s),
We have been having a lot of fun so far! We have made dreamcatchers. You might have seen them hanging in our windows at Curriculum Night. This past week, we created amazing self-portraits. Look for these at your Parent-Teacher Conference. This week we began designing spiders to accompany an Anansi folktale as part of our STEM work. We explored the materials today and designed our spiders. We will build our creations next week. We have lots of fun reading every day. Pretending to roll up our sleeves and get ready to do some hard work, starts our reading workshop each day. Strategy use is the focus of our lessons right now. We are continuing to choose "just right" books. We have also set goals for ourselves as readers. We do a great job! We have finished with our personal narrative writing unit. We set goals as writers too! We all published engaging stories. We are getting ready to begin a new writing unit on Monday. This will be a informational writing unit. We hope this new unit will be lots of fun. Sincerely, Ms. Collins' class Dear Parent(s),
We are excellent readers in Ms. Collins' class. We have been working on choosing "just right" books. We also have been working on increasing our independent reading stamina. We set a record of reading for thirty-three minutes and sixteen seconds! Wow, that's a lot! We LOVE reading. Ms. Collins reads to us all the time. Some of our favorites so far are Dog Eared, Cry Baby, Night of the Veggie Monster, and The Recess Queen. In our writing workshop, we are writing true stories from our lives. Our topic lists include lots of adventures from our summer vacations. We decorated our writer's notebooks. That was a lot of fun. We have done a lot of writing already. We just started exploring number grids. We are also working in our math journals. We are a great class and are really excited to be in second grade! Love, Ms. Collins' Class Dear Parent(s), I have been so fortunate to spend this year with your children. We have all grown so much these past ten months. We just finished exploring the life cycles of beetles and painted lady butterflies. We released the butterflies and said goodbye to our beetles (mealworms, pupas, and adult beetles) on Friday. The students enjoyed observing the changes that were taking place each day and writing about their observations. They also learned a great deal about caring for a living creature. We are continuing to explore beginning multiplication concepts in math, while still reinforcing our skills of double and triple digit addition and subtraction.
Poetry abounds during our writing workshop. We started our poetry unit last week after publishing our informational insect projects. The students are exploring word choice, using similes to create imagery, and line breaks. We have also been reading and discussing lots of poetry together. Finally, I am encouraging all of my students to participate in the Evanston Public Library's Summer Reading Game. This is a great way to encourage your student to keep reading this summer. I hope your summer is filled with lots of laughs and love! Ms. Collins Dear Parents,
We have finished our persuasive letters unit. As some of our classmates were trying to finish their persuasive letters, some classmates were reading nonfiction books about insects (which is our next writing unit). Our whole class is so excited for our new insect unit in writing workshop. This is just like our biography unit because you get to pick out what insect you want to study. We've been reading insect books to get ready for our NEW WRITING UNIT! Our whole class was working so hard on their persuasive letters to get to our new unit. In our reading groups we are reading books about insects. We are learning about their bodies, how they lay their eggs, how they stay alive, and what they eat. We are also learning about text features like labeled diagrams and bold print. In math we have studied quadrilaterals. These are shapes with connected lines (a closed shape). Quadrilaterals have four sides. We also learned about 3 dimensional shapes like a cube. We had a math test (open response). And we are doing herder multi-part warm-up math equations. In social studies we have been learning about land forms. First we learned about mountains and hills. We are also learning about water land forms like oceans, waterfalls. Soon we will learn about rivers and lakes. To wrap things up, people get to draw pretty drawings in their land form notebooks. Sincerely, Ms. Collins' Class Dear Parent(s), We have finished our biography writing unit. After revising, editing, and publishing our final drafts, we created posters about our famous people. We drew a picture of our person in the middle space and chose specific words about that person to radiate from the illustration. We began our new writing unit this week, persuasive letters. We began by learning about the structure of a letter. Today we discussed the word choices a writer makes to persuade the reader. We looked at letters written last year by a couple of second graders to help us think about word choice. Some of us are writing to parents, some to our teacher, and even to President Obama.
We just finished learning about the Iditarod. We tracked our favorite mushers and followed their progress through the race. On Thursday we were visited by Todd and Ron from the Happy Husky Bakery. They taught us more about the race and brought two huskies for us to meet (one was a puppy!) It was so much fun! Dear Parent(s),
We are making imaginary maps in our map skills unit. We are learning how to use symbols on a map (map key) that logically represent a real-life place. We are also studying globes and have learned about latitude and longitude lines. We have started drafting our biographies. We are using paragraphing and are indenting with each new paragraph. Next week we will be revising our drafts. We are experimenting with parentheses to include voice in our writing. These help us "whisper in the reader's ear" and share an opinion with the reader in our writing. We are close to finishing our math unit. We learned how to make ballpark estimates. These are good for checking to make sure our answers make sense. In reading groups, we have been writing summaries. As a class, we have been reading biographies about famous people and have been practicing our wondering. We read about Pablo Neruda, Jane Goodall, Jacques Cousteau, Carl Sagan, and Wangari Maathai. In science this week, we learned about properties of materials. We pretended we were stranded on a tropical island. We made hats to protect ourselves from the sun, but we only had a few materials left from our pretend lunches to use. We tested the materials for absorbency, softness, and reflective capabilities. We had so much fun making our hats! Ms. Collins' class |