Grade 2 Week of Feb. 27, 2017

Dear Families,

Welcome back!  We hope you had a joyful and restful break with your children. We have an exciting month ahead. We will begin in-school workshops with Construction Kids and The Center for Architecture to help our building of the Brooklyn Bridge.  Soon we will be setting up our trip to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge. Please keep an eye out for more info.

In Writer’s Workshop, we are knee deep in Realistic Fiction books. By sifting and sorting through bins of different  realistic fiction books we have learned what makes a realistic fiction book a realistic fiction book. This week we are focusing on how realistic fiction stories begin and who is telling the story. We have touched upon what a narrator is, 1st person perspective and 3rd person perspective. We will be continuing to focus on different parts of the text and beginning to think about how we are going to craft our on Realistic Fiction stories.

In Tribes, the second grade is taking each agreement and dissecting it to show what it looks like, sounds like and feels like. So far we have learned about Attentive Listening and Appreciations/ No Put Downs. We are working as a second grade community on practicing these agreements and making them a  part of our everyday life.

Appreciations/No Put Downs

Attentive Listening

We are starting a new unit in math this week. We will be exploring geometry! This unit allows our mathematicians to investigate attributes of 2D and 3D shapes, and involves big ideas about sorting and classifying. As a math teacher, I love watching how kids navigate the spatial challenges inherent in this unit. For some kids, geometry is a refreshing change from the number work we have been so focused on. Others find that reasoning about shapes and space provides a new and difficult challenge. This week, we will be focusing on the attributes of different shapes by describing, drawing, and classifying 2D and 3D shapes. Throughout the unit, we will continue to develop strategies for addition and subtraction by solving story problems, meeting in small groups, and playing differentiated math games.                  

In Social Studies, we are starting a new unit on urban, suburban, and rural areas, with a focus on New York City as an urban area. This week we are beginning to explore what makes each area unique. We will focus on the population density in each area, which will help explain why urban, suburban, and rural areas meet their transportation and housing needs in very different ways. We will connect the idea of population density to different density areas at BSI by exploring which parts of our school building are high density, which are low, and how the rooms are designed to meet the needs of the people using them.     

Have a great week!
Ms. Mathis and Ms. Anne