2H Class Blog!: Nov. 11th News

Proudly presenting the Published Authors of 2H!!!

Highlights from our week:

*Writing: On Friday, we had a BLAST celebrating our Kevin Henkes-inspired stories! Students demonstrated their ability to write just like our mentor author while creating their own interesting, realistic problem and solution! Bravo, writers! Their amazing stories were sent home on Friday along with all the compliments and praise they received from their peers. I hope you enjoy reading them!

We even got to share our fabulous stories with our 5th grade buddies. They were super impressed with our hard work!

*Reading: The owls have been having more fun than ever during their reader's workshop. As we're in our last stages of our nonfiction reading unit, they have grown enormously with their ability to sustain reading, pull out important information, talk about their learning, and, most recently, compare information across texts. This is a lot of work for second graders---thank goodness it's engaging and fun!! Early this week, each Owl received a "topic baggie". In it, there were 2-4 sources about a topic of their choice. They had so much fun digging in and learning even more as they read each text! It was some of the best reading work I've seen all year! Check them out!

The Nonfiction Book Fairy came!

All of this hard work, is gearing them up for our nonfiction reading celebration in which they will use their new learning to teach others what they know! We'll be working on that during this upcoming week. Be sure to ask your child about their topic and some of things they have learned.

*Science: This week in science we worked in teams to create model canyons! Using a mixture of cornmeal, salt, and water, students had to build their mountains and set up a structure to allow for a "rain storm".

After four rain storms, many models showed evidence of a canyon! While many groups had successfully created canyons, some groups learned a hard lesson about science: sometimes your experiment doesn't go exactly as planned. Unfortunately cornmeal canyons are not as structurally sound as real-life canyons! Regardless, these budding scientists learned a little about how canyons are created and a LOT about the scientific process.

*Book Orders: November Scholastic Book Orders were sent home last week and are due Friday, Nov. 16th. If you’re interested in buying any books as holiday gifts, you can order online and send me an email letting me know to keep the books until we can work out a time for you to pick them up—just let me know! You can also send a paper order and check in an envelope if you prefer ordering that way. I will send home one more book order before the holiday (Scholastic is pretty good about getting books delivered quickly!).

Enjoy the long, Veterans' weekend! Thank you to all who have served or are presently serving our great country!