Week 12

Welcome to week twelve! This week’s theme is: This is My Country!

It is getting cold outside! Please make sure your students come to school with a jacket each day.  Please remember that students can only wear jackets that are navy blue, white or hunter green inside the building.  The students may wear any color jacket at recess.

Take-Home Reading Bags:  We are still in the process of tweaking our system.  If your child does not bring home a bag every day do not be too concerned, as our the project is dependent upon volunteer availability.  Also, if your child’s book does not get switched out, it may be because the signature was missing on the slip inside the bag.  The parent signature means that the book has been read and the child is ready for the next book.  It is OK to take more than one day per book if needed.

Drama News:  Be sure to ask your students to tell you all about the recent plays they have seen.  On Halloween they saw two skits about bullying.  On Friday, last week, the saw a wonderful little production of Flat Stanley.  Our class demonstrated great audience etiquette!  I think it wet their appetite for taking drama in the future!

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: signing and understanding the meaning of “Liberty” and “Justice.” 

Dance:  Students will be exploring the different sizes movement can be performed in their kinesphere, small vs. large, and narrow vs. wide.

Health: - Students will continue to analyze harmful substances and identify which side effects result from taking certain drugs through a find-and-match activity.

Math: Students will begin their study of geometry by learning about two dimensional shapes.

Music: Rhythm and bells, lyrics and so me notes

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!

Reading:  Large Group Phonics: Variant Vowels al, au, aw, Small Group Phonics: “R” Controlled Vowels: or, Shared Reading: Fables “The Hare and the Tortoise,” Guided Reading by leveled groups, Centers (SSR, iPods, Computers, Partner reading

Science: Students will begin studying animals and their habitats.

Social Studies: Students will finish up their study of the continents

Spanish: Students will continue to review the vocabulary for clothing.

Writing:

• Writing: Hand writing with Mrs. P: Students will be learning the penmanship of lowercase “l and k.” 
• Composition with Mrs. P: During composition time students will begin writing biographies of a classmate or writing an auto-biography.
• 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:  Now we are applying those skills to identify the subjects and verbs in the sentences.  This is a prerequisite skill for the second grade benchmark skill: I can correctly use adjectives, adverbs and the past tense of irregular verbs.  Since subject-verb identification may be review for some, 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.