2H Class Blog!: Nov. 4th News

A big thank you to all those who made it out to parent conferences. The home-school connection is such a vital piece of a child's education. I am committed to keeping you involved as we work together for the remainder of the school year. We're set up for a wonderful rest of our year together!

Highlights from our week:

*Math Workshop: We are working hard here in 2H applying all of our place value knowledge to whole number operations. This work has a heavy focus on multi-digit addition and subtracton. Before students are exposed to the traditional algorithm for addition or subtraction, they are taught several other strategies. The first strategey we introducced is:

Base-10 Blocks: Students can physically build each number and then count all of their blocks to arrive at a total. Students have been taught how to use "base-10 shorthand" to draw our their numbers instead of physically building them. They can then count their drawing when adding to find their sum. They know that sometimes they need to make a "trade"!

Students can practice this skill at home using IXL skill G.6 (they'll need scrap paper or a whiteboard to complete the problems!). We'll be working on additional strategies over the upcoming week.

*Word Study: We've begun our first unit in Words Their Way! Units run in two-week cycles. On the first day of the cycle, the sort is introduced. Students explore and analyze the words to discover patterns and consistencies and to establish rules. The first week of the unit is done completely in class to build independence. The second week of our cycle is when you see the word sort coming home. Your child can plan to see their sort coming home this Monday, along with activties they can do to practice their words. Practice will now happen in both the classroom and at home.

In addition to the activities associated with our word sorts, our word study time is also spent on grammar concepts. While introducing the parts of speech, students had a great time creating jack-o-lanterns representing different adjectives!! Take a look at their clever creations!

*Writer's Workshop: Students have been doing an amazing job demonstrating their ability to write and illustrate just like our mentor author, Kevin Henkes! Each student has finishing drafting their own interesting, realistic problem and solution and are just putting the finishing touches on their illustrations! Bravo, writers! As soon as all of our stories are finished, we're shipping them off to the "publishers" and look forward to celebrating these fabulous stories soon!

*Science Buddies: Inspired by our hike the previous week, students were sent off to design an outdoor learning space for SMS. Everyone agreed that they LOVE our school garden (and of course love our playground!), but wondered if their was an additional learning space we could create for the beautiful woods. Creating design plans, we saw everything from tree houses to forts, fairy houses to tipis, cabins to yurts! These designers were SO into this process, we look forward to seeing next steps and seeing if we can bring some of these ideas to life! Stay tuned :)

*Fifth Grade Buddies: Instead of meeting with our buddies on Friday, this week we joined them on Halloween for some creative, design fun! Students were first challenged to design a spiderweb (the easy part!). After their design was complete, the real challenge began as they had to use yarn, glue, scissors, and wax paper to bring their design to life (the hard part!). While it was certainly sticky work, each partnership worked great together and their end products came out really cool!