Grade 2 Week of January 18, 2017

Hello Families,

It was great to see so many of you at the Parent Meeting this morning. We hope it helped to clarify our current units of study and plans we have moving forward. Here’s what we’ll be covering this week:

In Writer’s Workshop, we are going to begin the second half of our Nonfiction Unit. This portion of the unit is linked with the New Amsterdam Unit from our Social Studies curriculum. Students will be learning about the components of feature articles that make them different from other articles they read. Students will be writing about an aspect of life in New Amsterdam, and will be picking their specific topics by the end of the week. I will be integrating the use of the computer into the final project as well. I will keep you posted on the progress. Be sure to chat with them about it. We also have been continuing our work on grammar and spelling. Below are some charts we made that show some grammar skills we have learned.

In Reader’s Workshop, we are diving right into ‘Jake Drake, Bully Buster.’ Through our reading of Jake Drake we’ll be focusing on the different connections we can make to the text as readers. We have briefly discussed a ‘text to self’ connection in which the students turned and talked to a partner about an experience that was related to what we read in chapter 1. This book is centered around topics such as bullying and friendship which we are constantly working on. Also, please remind your child that they should be reading at least 15-20 minutes a night and if possible have them read aloud to you.

In Math, we are starting our new investigation “The T-Shirt Factory” this week. As I mentioned this morning, we will be exploring place value through the context of this unit. Our goal is for the children to develop a deep conceptual understanding of place value and ultimately of how and why the traditional algorithm works as a strategy based on place value. The unit begins within the context of a family that runs a t-shirt business. The family decides to organize their inventory of t-shirts into rolls of ten t-shirts and loose ones. This morning, students explored how many rolls and loose shirts could be made from different numbers of shirts (ex. 43 shirts, 182 shirts). Already, some big ideas and concepts arose, including the need for organization, patterns in the number system, and equivalence.

In Social Studies, we are beginning to study how New York City has changed over time. This week we are looking at how the population has changed in the city, why different immigrant groups moved to New York around 1900, and what their lives were like. We will focus on Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe as well as Chinese and Italian immigrants, all of whom settled in the Lower East Side. Our reading today led to a discussion of why immigrants from the same country or region tend to settle close by one another in a new city. The children had many personal connections, as they recognize this tendency in their own communities as well. Now is a great time to share the immigration stories that make each of your own families unique.

Just some reminders, please send in the trip permission slips as soon as possible. The trip to the Tenement Museum is on February 13, 2017.  We will be sharing information about New Amsterdam Day .(January 27th) shortly. Please be on the lookout for updates. We will need some volunteers. Please do not send your child to school with Pokemon cards or Rubik cubes. If they are seen out in class or lunch they will be taken away and you will be emailed about it. Thank you in advance for the cooperation.

Have a great week!

Ms. Mathis and Ms. Anne