Today we had a visit from Ms. Antonina Sztyma, who is an IB student. She came to our school to talk to the students about economy and how it is related to natural resources, preserving them and making wise choices as consumers. It was a great enrichment of our science and social studies lessons. The most active students were awarded with water bottles that Ms. Sztyma designed herself.
We have had a great couple of weeks back in grade 2 after the winter holidays.
In Mathematics we have been working on some basic multiplication! We are using repeated addition, arrays, and pictures to understand how multiplication works.
In Science we reviewed natural resources and what things can be produced from them. It was very appropriate today for our “Eco Nomia” workshop where we discussed scarce resources and how to help our environment! We also began our unit on weather. The first thing we read about were different types of clouds.
In Language Arts we have been working on compound sentences in grammar and main idea and details. We continued to work on writing different paragraphs and being creative in our writing.
In Language Arts we looked at words that use ‘oo’ and noticed the short or long sound ‘oo’ makes in different words such as ‘look’ and ‘moon’. We explored nonfiction books, using the text features to help us better understand the information. We looked specifically at text features such as: table of contents, glossary, heading, photographs, pictures, diagrams, labels, captions, and bolded words.
In Science we researched an animal in the Computer Lab, finding out what the animals eats, where it lives, what it looks like, and what makes it special. We are writing about our animals as informational writing. We also thought about how to draw like a scientist, focusing on making our drawings Accurate, Big (thinking about the size), Captions (writing a sentence to describe the picture), and Detailed – ABCD. One of our students brought in two stick insects for us to learn about, observe, and draw. Next week we will publish our research with informational writing and scientific drawings about our animals.
In Math we found missing subtrahends, such as 9 – _____ = 3. We balanced equations, noting that the value needs to be the same on both sides of the equation.
This week in English we continued our Reading & writing unit we started last week.
We learned and practiced four new sight words; he, be, we, go.
We read our second decodable book, A Nap and a Map.
We made entries about our families in the journals.
In Maths we continue to work on Counting and Cardinality within numbers up to 20, and their value.
We use number bonds and addition in hands-on creation of these numbers using our math manipulatives, which helps us gain amazing numer sense.
In language arts, we continued our novel study. The students are doing a wonderful job comprehending and summarizing the chapters. We stop often to discuss the historical connections in the story, as historical fiction stories often have many historical roots. We built on our character analysis, as well. Looking forward to reading on next week!
Science: In science the students wrote a test about outer space. Then we started discussing matter and it’s physical properties. We learnt about how to measure and count volume. What is density? Which properties can be observed with our senses and which need tools to be measured?
The students also made wind vanes and rain gauges and we are making observations about the weather.
