Mrs. Pike’s 2nd Grade Newsletter
	Volume  4- September 25th-29th

This Week in Grade 2
We had a fun and busy week in grade 2! The students loved their first Mini Academies in grade 2! They were busy having fun and participating in everything from the Science of bottle flipping and cooking Thai dessert to making Gak and Batik painting. THANK YOU to all the parents who volunteered their time and creativity to make Mini Academies enjoyable and successful for everyone.   There are still plenty of opportunities to sign up for upcoming mini academies each month. On Friday we also had our annual birthday bash celebrating all of our September birthdays.         Please make sure you look in your child’s take home folder for your conference time notice letter. Read the letter and sign and return it in your child’s folder this week so that we can ensure you are able to attend the conference time listed.          On Monday we will have a new Home Learning Menu. Please remember your child must read for 20 minutes each night but the home learning menu items are optional. If an activity is completed, students may bring finished work into class or you can email us a photo and or video. The kids really enjoy sharing and celebrating home learning with the class during our morning meeting time.

Language Arts
Our readers have been noticing and naming powerful craft moves that writers are using in their own books and how to try these out in their own writing. We also explored how books have a way of “clicking together” in predictable ways and student again practiced the important skill of retelling stories in order with details. We reviewed the importance of monitoring our own reading and now that we are more grown up, we reread and fix our own mistakes. Students read in their partnerships this week and saw the usefulness of having a buddy to help remind them of mistakes or give tips on how to decode a tricky word. Our writers have been busily writing narrative stories with interesting beginnings, powerful words and interesting details and punctuation that they are finding in during reading time. It is fun to watch them try out different ways of making their writing more fun to read and feel the power of mimicking famous authors.

Math
This week we continued to review math skills such as skip counting, comparing numbers, modeling numbers in different ways and fact fluency as we wrap up this unit next week. Students were challenged further with some rich tasks, problem solving activities and riddles utilizing their knowledge of Base Ten in new ways. Continuing to support students at home with skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s from various numbers up and down orally will help them improve these skills. Also, finding fun ways to weave in addition and subtraction practice into games and activities at home will help students become more fluent.

Social Studies
This week in our communities unit students discussed qualities in a good leader as well as important laws or rules of a community. Our own school leaders will soon be interviewed by our students as they continue to explore what it takes to be successful and fair leaders and responsible citizens. Students continue to work on designing their own communities with their ideal leaders and laws as well as services their community provides.

Important Dates

Important dates

Important Dates October 2nd -New Home Learning Posted October 9th and 10th- No School Parent and Student  3 way conferences

Dinner Questions
1 - What are the most important qualities in a good and fair leader? 2- What laws do you think are the most important in a community? Why? 3- What is something that you are curious about that you would like to explore more?

Week of September 18th

NEWS:

In reading our focus this week was "word attack" strategies. Basically this entails first cross-checking ourselves to see whether what we are reading makes sense and if it doesn't then using strategies to solve words successfully by looking at the beginning, middle, and ending of words. We are also continuing to jot down notes on our reading about things we find interesting, puzzling, or want to explore further as a means to aid our comprehension.

In writing our focus this week remained on developing our small moment personal narratives and extending them further by elaborating on details using the senses to make our writing more interesting. We acted out parts of our story to really be able to show and not just tell what our bodies and faces were doing and what we said and to show emotion rather than just write-I was sad. We will continue our work last week noticing powerful things master authors are doing in our mentor texts and trying them out such as: an ellipse..., or a repeating line or some onomatopoeia(sound word).

In math our focus remains on work with base ten relationships and modelling. This week we learned about modelling numbers in expanded form with the value of each digit, as well as standard and word form. We will continue this as there are a lot of new vocabulary words. We did some extension activities and it was good for students to practice growth mindset and use resources when faced with challenging tasks.

In social studies we started building our own ideal communities, discussing what kinds of features our particular kind of community has. We learned about good and services and started planning the goods and services we want in our community.

Home learning has started. Just a reminder you can click here This page can also be accessed through the Home learning tab on our page above. .

IMPORTANT

Please subscribe to this blog via email to receive notifications of blog posts. New posts for the upcoming week will go out every Sunday around 4pm.

UPCOMING

ES Parent Teacher conferences will be held on Monday,  October 9th and Tuesday, October 10th. We will send more information regarding specific dates and times for appointments soon.

Subscribe to the ISKL ES Google Calendar and also our Grade 2 rotation calendar to stay up to date with any last minute changes (on the right hand side of your screen).

DINNER QUESTIONS
*What was your favorite Hari Raya station?
*What strategies have you learned to solve tricky words?
*What kind of laws will you have in your community?

Three day week!

           We had a full week even though it was only 3 days! Students had fun with their new after school activities and yet again added some pretty creative dance moves to their morning dance on Wednesday. They reflected on what a respectful student looks like during counselling time with Mrs. Wright. I am now starting to have students reflect weekly on our school's SLRs and which ones they think they were glowing, and which they are still growing. They will upload to Seesaw

What an enthusiastic group of learners! They earned another star party and wanted to do science experiments, so next week we will spend some time in the lab. The class was very techie this week learning how to use 2 new applications to create projects about communities, make toolkits to help them with writing and they also are getting more familiar with sharing work on Seesaw. I have shown all student the Home Learning document on our Home Learning tab. PLEASE email me if you have any difficulties. We spend time each week to celebrate any work students chose to do. 

Upcoming Events:

-Swimming this week is on Thursday, Library is Wednesday

-Hari Raya Cultural day is Friday, students may dress in local dress and we will have our hallway activities at 10:00, assembly will be at 11:00. Mrs. Pike will be gone as I have IASAS tournament for coaching this weekend.
-Parent MAP workshop is 10:00 Thursday. MAP scores will be going home this year for all students, so it is a good workshop to just get informed about how to interpret scores and how the assessments work.
-Friday 22nd no school
-I will be sending a letter to you soon to ask if you have parent conference preferences for time slots. We always book siblings in different grades together. 

All About Seesaw

Thank you all for signing up to view your child's account. I apologize if you have gotten many notifications lately. Sometimes I share things with all students to edit and manipulate, you receive those updates, so you can ignore those. The kids often decide what they want to put into Seesaw, and often reflect on how teaching points in our units are going. This will turn into a digital portfolio, so that is why they use it often to upload videos, images or it is for me to see if they are understanding a recent lesson. Thee are not rehearsed and many are not necessarily final products, so there may be errors, it may sometimes be misspelled or confusing. I spend time commenting or talking with students about their posts, but wanted you to know that it is an ongoing, working process that they are doing not their final products. Sometimes I send announcements via Seesaw, you can reply if you would like. Students will learn about comments and Imojis this week and how to be ethical when using them.

Math
We continue to work with Base Ten relationships and modelling. This week we played games and solved riddles based on clues about each place as well as discussed the VALUE of digits and where that comes from. This will stem into expanded form and standard form of numbers and comparing numbers in coming weeks. We are practicing addition facts each week and still working on effectively skip counting from various points up and down by 5s, 2s and 10s.

Reading and Writing Workshop
We are in revising stages right now, using mentor authors and narrative rubrics and checklists to see how our writing can become even better. Students have spend a few days setting goals and trying to reach those goals by improving their writing so that is is more detailed or more readable. We have learned about powerful leads and endings and how to add actions, talking and setting details. We will work more next week on powerful words and creating a intended mood with our stories. In reading we are done with our strategies from Bend 1 which you will see in Seesaw. The class used a sticky note application to record thinking jots and will continue to practice reading more fluently, setting goals for number of pages and minutes read and taking time to stop, think and jot it down. Next week, word attack strategies!

Social Studies
We are now studying how communities are organized and learning about urban, suburban and rural. Students shared their home communities and some similarities and differences we have in our class. We read about them on Big Universe, watched Brainpop and created posters and Ibooks about the three different types. Next week we will start learning about producers, consumers, goods and services and what jobs are most important in a community. We will have some class debates and do some school tours and interviews to see what kinds of services are in our school community.

Word Study
Initial word assessments have been done. Next week we sill start looking at long vowel teams and reviewing prefix, suffix and base words. We will explore some adjectives and start using our handwriting booklets. Each group of students will be given individual words to sort, explore and learn how to spell. Then at the end of coming weeks I will send them home for your use.

At Home
See if your child would like to do any of the Home Learning activities. Continue reading each night. Please know reading with and to your child is still wonderful and students can also use: Tumblebooks, Big Universe and RAZ kids as they have loggins for each. RAZ kids they can record their voice, and I can listen and comment. Continue finding opportunities to have them skip count, count groups of objects around the house and practice math facts while passing or kicking a ball. Ask them to point out buildings, parks, jobs, shops etc. in their community. Also, have them orally retell a story in the car about something that happened over the weekend with details. Oral storytelling is a great starting place for crafting a story and planning before writing on paper.

NOTEWORTHY EVENTS 
This is a great Science Festival that would be so fun to take kids to next week=)
http://www.sciencefestival.my/

Last week of August weekly post

Happy September already! We had a short but full week and it looks like another short week will be in order next week as well. I have had to alter the calendar a bit under our class documents to make up for our lost day next week=) We will have to skip Monday after school activities and also move library day to FRIDAY. That means that we will start the week with PE swimming oh boy! Please send some sort of small bag with your child, it makes it easier for them to transport clothes with lunches and water bottles.

This week we start our Home Learning, so you will now be able to access this document on the Home Learning Tab. This will be open until our next Home Learning menu which will start the first week of October. Please remember your child only needs to do a few tasks as they choose in addition to always reading 20 minutes every night. We will take time on Fridays to review any work sent in via folders, email or even Seesaw. Feel free to email with any clarifying questions.

Here's what was going on last week in 2CP:
Math:
We continued with our place value unit and talked about how digits can change their place and it changes the value of the number making it greater or smaller. Students created different numbers by organizing digits in certain ways. We worked on building and drawing numbers with Place Value blocks and how to model a number in different ways with different blocks. We also started to practice our fact fluency using the application Hooda math. Students are still a bit weak with counting up and down by 5s and 10s at different points: 180, 210, 60. This would make a good car ride game.

ELA:
In writing we continue to look to the masters for ideas and inspiration to help add more details in our stories. The kinds of detail we have focused on to start our stories and be woven within them are: dialogue, actions and setting where they use their senses. Stretching one idea across pages and helping the reader picture how they felt were other areas of focus. In reading we have been working on changing our voice to match the story and reading more smoothly. This week we added in pausing to make sure we were actually thinking and not just reading. So we put sticky notes on our books on different pages to remind ourselves to often: pause, think and retell what we have read. You can do this with them at home as well to check in on understanding.

Social Studies:
Last week on the island and our island rescue. Students made maps of their island with landforms, a map key and a compass. They reflected on what they learned about communities on their island, what went well and what was hard. By the end of the island time they have built shelters, created jobs for each person, set up food markets and used wood chips as currency. They said they did not need a leader and were just starting to see the importance and need of rules. They will now choose 1 of the 3: urban, suburban or rural communities and will create their own community in the coming weeks.

Other:
We started our first of many Wondering Wednesdays. I firmly believe in carving out time for authentic inquiry and allowing students to pursue their own interests. We discussed all the many ways people can answer questions besides simply typing the question into Google. The students had some questions from their wondering journals and our wonder wall. They broke into groups to help one another answer their questions about Singapore, Greenland, Queen ants, Chinese calendar, and snake venom. We used National Geographic and online encyclopedia, books from the library and next week we will ask the experts. I told them you were also experts and that we also make observations to answer our wonderings. We will use the website below as well on Wednesdays. It has a new wondering everyday kids get to learn about.

https://wonderopolis.org/