October 26, 2018 Newsletter

Friday, October 26th, 2018

Dear Parents,

Notes for this week:

We are excited to announce our upcoming field trip to the Teaching Museum!!! We will be participating in fun hands-on activities. Look out for the permission slip in your child’s folder today! 😊

Friendly reminder: Please help your children remember to leave toys, Pokémon cards and Fitbits at home. Students are losing them and very distracted by them throughout the day. We will be confiscating toys that become a disruption.

*Math 2.1 (on)-UNIT 2: Becoming Fluent With Addition and Subtraction

This past week we have been focusing on addition and subtraction strategies with single digit math problems in order for students to practice and learn the strategies. Student were assessed on math vocabulary and these addition strategies this past Thursday. Students will be learning and applying subtraction strategies next week.

Also, Students need to recognize coins and know their values (Penny, Nickel, Dime, and Quarter). Students will use skip-counting strategies to count mixed groups of coins to find the total value.

*Math 2.2 (Adv)-UNIT 5: Understanding Plane and Solid Figures

Students have been describing 2-D shapes by their attributes. These attributes are the number of sides, angles and vertices. Students were quizzed on this knowledge this past Thursday. We will be partitioning shapes and discussing fractions of a variety of shapes next week.

-While we have been exploring and comparing many 3D shapes, the students are only required to identify and count the number of faces, vertices, and edges of a cube.

-Next week we will continue to partition shapes into equal shares to represent halves, thirds, and fourths.

*Science- We are wrapping up our exploration of Matter and its properties this week. Please check Home Access as there are several students that owe assignments. If they have not turned in an assignment it will be marked as “NHI” which means “Not handed in”. I have reminded students who have not turned in classwork and are helping them understand their responsibility for turning in assignments. We had our Matter unit test on Thursday. Next week we will be starting our Social Studies unit about the Cherokee and Creek Native American cultures.

*Reading- Continue reading each night from the bag book. Once students have read the bag book with you, for the remainder of the 15 minutes they can read from any book of their choosing. Please sign the reading log each Thursday night! The bag book/reading log does count for a homework grade.

***Next week: Look out for NEW reading response sheets/logs with your student’s bag books! These should be returned weekly with your child’s bag books on Friday. Students will pick 4 out of the 5 listed activities. Parents, please check your child’s work and sign off on the response sheets. These will be a fun and reflective way for our students to dive into reading! 😊

This week we continued studying nonfiction books. We learned about new text features such as pictures/photographs, captions, graphs, diagrams and illustrations (which students are having fun applying to their informational writing!). In addition, we have been reviewing main idea and supporting details. Ask your child about the main idea and supporting details when reading non-fiction bag books together.

Tell your children to look out for a Spooktacular Reading & ELA activity next Wednesday!

*Writing/Grammar- This week students are continuing writing “All About” books. They are writing about topics they have a lot of information about. Students are learning how to write a Table of Contents to help them break their topic into smaller parts. For example, a student may write a topic about matter. In this case the student may want to break their topic into chapters or pages that might include: an introduction, a page on solids, a page on liquids, a page on gases, and a conclusion. We have been also working on generating topic sentences, and then bulleted lists to organize their ideas.

Our students have truly enjoyed applying their knowledge of nonfiction text features in their writing such as pictures with captions and diagrams. We are so proud of their writing!

We will have our next spelling test on Thursday November 1st. Your child should have received their new spelling words today.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Sincerely,

Ms. Rebecca Henschel and Ms. Barbra Mitchell

Henschelra@fultonschools.org

Mitchellb@fultonschools.org

https://mitchellb4.wixsite.com/shakerag2ndgrade