Week 17

Welcome to week seventeen! This week’s theme is: Happy Holidays!

Our next field trip will be to the Thanksgiving Point Dinosaur Museum.  We will leave the school at 10:00 and return to the school at 1:00.  We will be gone from the school during lunch. The school will provide school sack lunches (at the normal price) for each student.  If you do not want your child to receive a school sack lunch on the 18^th, please email your child’s teacher.  If we do not receive an email from you, a sack lunch will be charged to your account.  

If you would like to chaperone our field trip, please email your child’s teacher (we would love to have you!). However, if you are not the first volunteer from our grade you will have to pay your own admission as we are only allowed one free parent chaperone per grade.

We have had a few dedicated parents who have been consistently coming in to switch our books for the Take Home Reading Program.  We are very grateful to these volunteers, but we want to be to be sure that they do not have to come in to our school every day.   If you are available to volunteer in our Take Home Reading Program, please sign up for the day of your choice at the following link: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vip-IwZRyMC-PvaHbGSCxNu53Mx1pdOMoSDE-31wobQ/edit

Here is a look at what we are learning this week:

Art: Students will continue working on their student directed art projects using mediums such as collage, pastels, paper construction, and water color.

ASL: Color assessment. Introduction to foods.

Dance:  Relationships between body shapes (i.e. over/under, far/ away)

Health: Self-esteem.  Encourage your child to identify his/her strengths.

Math: Students will begin studying patterns.

Music: Rhythm and bells, lyrics and so me notes, Christmas Songs.  Students are playing instruments on cue to create a musical dramatic reading of select Christmas stories.

PE: Students are working on their Presidential Fitness by running or walking laps of our school. Second Grade has already run 100 miles this school year! We hope to make it to 200 miles by Thanksgiving.  As the weather gets bad we will have indoor recess whenever it is snowing or raining or freezing.  Please have your children dressed for weather as we will go out in the cold, clear, crisp air this winter!  We need lots of gloves to keep here at school.  Please donate gloves!

Reading: Large Group Phonics: r- Controlled  e , i, u, Small Group Phonics: Vowel Combinations: ie, ui, Shared Reading: Around Town “Big Bushy Mustache,  “ Guided Reading by leveled groups, Centers (SSR, iPods, Computers, Partner reading

Science: Students will study animals and their habitats.

Social Studies: Students will continue their study of the continents and the animals that live on them.

Spanish: Students will begin studying the vocabulary for vegetables.

Writing:

• Writing: Hand writing with Mrs. P: Students will be learning the penmanship of lowercase “h.b”

• Composition with Mrs. P: During composition time students will continue writing animal reports.  

• Spelling with Mrs. S: Students are grouped by levels and engage in Words Their Way sorting activities.  Students sort words into categories by sounds patterns according to their present level of functioning.  This week students will play word board games.

• Sentence Fundamentals with Mrs. S:: Students will continue their study of PENSMARK, a self-regulating strategy developed to teach sentence fundamentals: capital letters, end marks, making sense, simple sentence formulas, and subject/ verb identification. PENSMARK is a mnemonic device that stands for Pick a formula, Explore words to fit the formula, Note the words, Search and Check, Mark out the imposters, Ask “Is there a verb?”, Root out the subject, and Key in on the beginning, middle, and end. Everyone has mastered the three requirements of a complete sentence: Capital letter, End mark, and “Makes sense.” We finished the prerequisite skills for identifying subject nouns and verbs and most the students have mastered identifying the subjects and verbs in the sentences. Now the students will apply their skills in writing their own simple sentences with subjects and verbs.  This is the SV formula, the first of five simple sentence formulas that we will learn. This may be review for some; therefore, students will work at their own pace advancing to the next level as soon as they receive a score of 100 on three consecutive trials.