Mrs. Scalia's 2nd Grade Blog

Students did a beautiful job in our unit on the aging/elderly. We started by talking about signs of aging and read many stories about grandparents and elderly people.  We then wrote our own fun stories about grandparents or elderly friends, often making them the heroes/heroines of the story. In preparation for our fieldtrip we had a wonderful speaker and aid from Oak Meadows Senior Living Home come to discuss and help us experience some of the physical changes that may affect the elderly. She taped our fingers together to feel the stiffness of arthritis, put marbles in our shoes to feel the discomfort in our feet and we tried to read with glasses that were hard to see out of.  It was interesting to see the reactions of students as they realized the physical changes that affect the elderly and how quickly they wanted to undo these signs of aging. Yesterday we took a field trip to visit residents of the Oak Meadows Home and shared our stories. We also, along with Ms. Espeland, sang some of our favorite songs from the year. It was really neat to see our second graders use their speaking skills and beautiful manners to connect with these special new friends. 

Please click below to see pictures of our experiences.

Oak Meadows.mov

Well we are finally seeing some green grass and spring flowers. It has been a slow coming spring but these gray days have been great to help us stay focused in the classroom.

We have worked hard to take notes on our animal for our reports and color code our facts. Animal research folders and directions went home yesterday and it is now time for you to help us organize and complete our fact writing. Please let me know if you have any questions.  Completed facts and folders are due back Monday, May 9.  Thank you in advance for your help!

This week we wrapped up our study of Helen Keller. She was a fascinating woman who continues to inspire many today.  We had many great discussions on both what life would be like with her disabilities but also her amazing ability to work hard to overcome them.   We will be continuing our biography study, working on autobiographies and reading biographies of many famous African Americans.  The autobiography interview assignment was due last Friday and we will be starting work on these on Monday so please make sure your student handed it in.

In math students have worked hard this week practicing calculating perimeter and area.  We did many fun activities such as measuring and mapping the perimeter of our classroom and converting it down using a one foot equal to one centimeter scale.  Next week we will be moving onto a unit on money.

Students had a wonderful time at the Kindess Assembly presented by Youth Frontiers. Students sang and danced as we learned how to promote kindness and take care of our classmates... And we met Rachel and her friend Squeaker! 

We were able to find a wonderful and warm afternoon to help clean up our school grounds.  We have been reading many books in our classroom about ecology and caring for the earth.  I hope to inspire students to think about the environment not just on Earth Day but every day!

Yesterday we met with our friends in the other second grade class to create and pack our Birthday Boxes.  Students did a beautiful job of decorating boxes with thoughtful birthday pictures and wishes as well as carefully packing the treasures inside.  We packed 16 boxes altogether that will be brought to a local food shelf.  Thank you for your help in supplying wonderful birthday items! Click below for some fun photos of the event!

Birthday Boxes.mov

On April 25, we will be hosting a K-3 Kindness Assembly here at Mounds Park Academy.  Beginning at 8:40 am in the Recital Hall, your student will be involved in an assembly facilitated by Youth Frontiers Inc.

Youth Frontiers is a nonprofit organization that has been delivering programs to schools for over 20 years.  This one-hour assembly is designed especially for students in grades K-3 to lay the groundwork for kindness in the school setting.  Through music, humor, and interactive puppetry, the Kindness Assembly helps demonstrate the importance of including others, apologizing, and being a good friend.

This assembly is made possible through money raised by our parents and students who dutifully clip out box tops and turn in bottle caps.  Thank you!  We appreciate your donations and hope to make this an annual event.

If you would like to learn more about the Kindness Assembly, feel free to visit their website at http://www.youthfrontiers.org/. 

Thank you again,

Tony Reimers Renee Wright

PreK-8 Director Assistant Lower School Director

Happy Spring!  We love the green grass and the spring sunshine!  Recess is full of fun energy and we are busy in our classroom too!  We have been at work learning about paragraphs.  We are writing topic sentences, including at least three details and writing a conclusion sentence.  We practiced writing with our own descriptive paragraphs as well as "How to" paragraphs.   Our work on How to Eat an Oreo Cookie is posted on our lockers.  Students are doing beautifully and realizing what great writers they are!

We have done the preliminary work to prepare for our Animal Research Reports.  We have written questions that we want to know about our animals, we have looked at examples of reports to see what we might include and we have started computer and library research to find articles and books on our topics.  We have also talked about note taking and the fact that we cannot copy work straight from a source.  We have begun to take notes on our animals and will continue to through next week.  Students can continue to research articles at home and bring in more resources if they wish.  Ms. Gaida has posted some wonderful resources on her blog for students to use.  They can explore them at:

http://blogs.moundsparkacademy.org/ngaida/2011/03/animal-research.html

Thank you Ms. Gaida!

In social studies we have started a new unit on biographies.  We are currently working on a chapter book about Helen Keller.  Watch for an assignment to come home that will help us gather information to help us work on our own autobiography. 

In math we are learning about measurement.  We are practicing measuring in feet, inches and centimeters using rulers and tape measures.  We will also be practicing finding the perimeter and area of objects.  More info to come!

Here is a note from Ms. Selb about the new science unit...

Our new science unit is Plants! Already, we've written our own definition of living things, discovered the things that a plant needs to live and grow, and planted our own bean sprouts. We will be doing a variety of planting projects and observing plants as they grow to discover how they grow, what plants eat, and how plants make new plants. We'll also discuss why plants are an important part of Earth's ecosystems, and what we can do to protect them. Our second graders have some very green thumbs, and we'll be putting them into practice!

Reminders:

Due to our short week we have a spelling test tomorrow. 

Book orders are due Thursday as well.

Students can bring in library books to trade in, as we will miss our library day on Friday. 

Have a great long weekend!

Wow, March has flown by!  We were very busy with storytelling and what a great event it turned out to be!  Thank you to the many family members that were able to come and be a part of our "Tea".   We are wrapping up videotaping our stories and I will be sending a copy of videos home after break.  It was great to see personalities shine through in the stories that were picked and the presentations. THANK YOU so much for all of your help and guidance at home.  We couldn't have done it without you!  All of the students did so well and learned so much!

In math we have working on being more confident telling time but also looking at elapsed time. You will see practice coming home. Please encourage kids to practice in every day situations.

I will be sending home a practice packet over break.  It is again optional but I would love to see all students doing some practice over break.  I do not need them returned unless kids want me to see what wonderful things they did. I do encourage you to correct packets at home with students so they can see immediate feedback both on successes but also things to fix...and to learn from them.

We are wrapping up a lot of things this week including our work with immigration and heritage.  It was so neat to see the kids share their knowledge of their own heritage.

I wish you a happy and safe spring break!  See you in April!

Please click to see fun pictures from our March activities!

While the wintry days of February are coming to a close, we have been busy with many things in our cozy classroom.

Language Arts:  We have been working on storytelling every day and are now practicing our stories in small groups.  We have introduced the skills of eye contact, volume and tempo as well as have worked on an introduction and closing for our stories.  Students are doing a fabulous job of sharing stories but also giving feedback to their group members.  You will continue to see the "Storytelling Feedback Form" coming home for homework over the next two weeks.  Thank you for your continued help in guiding practice at home.  We are excited for our event on Friday, March 11 at 9:00.  I will be videotaping presentations ahead of time too in case someone is unable to make and sending a copy home to enjoy.

We are doing well with plural nouns and will be adding practice with proper nouns.  We are also wrapping up fairy tales and wrote our own class fairy tale based on the Candy Land Game.  Students were creative and had a great time brainstorming together and watching our story unfold.  We are now on the step of illustrating.  Next week we will be reading and working on fables.

Math:  We are wrapping up our graphing unit and we are moving to a unit on telling time.  We will be learning to tell time to the minute but also working with elapsed time problems.   We continue to work hard on problem solving skills too with our daily word problems. 

MPA students had a chance to connect with buddies last week at our Pairing Assembly.  We had a great time with our eighth grade friends doing puzzles and visiting.  It is so great to hear the conversations and laughter between the two age groups.

Please click on the link below to enjoy pictures from Valentine's Day, puzzles with our buddies, story telling practice and other February fun.  

February Pictures.mov

Have a great weekend!

Happy February!  We have been very busy week in room 114!  Here is a little of what we have been up to...

Language Arts:  Last week we worked on tall tales.  We read and analyzed tall tales which are exaggerated tales based on real life people.  We created our own tall tale characters with far-fetched traits.  These are hanging in the hall so please feel free to take a peek when you are here for conferences this week.  We also took time last week to write our own favorite adventure and then rewrite it as a tall tale.  It has been fun to see the wonderful creative ideas!  This week we will be reading fairy tales along with starting to learn our own story telling story.  Students have now chosen their own favorite book and have created a story map to go along with it.  A story map is a series of thumbnail sketches that tell the story and will help students transition from needing the book in front of them to telling the story using the story map and then finally knowing it from memory.  Story maps will go home later this week and story telling practice will soon be a part of nightly homework.  More information to follow soon!

As part of our noun practice we have made a class alphabet book of nouns.  Each student created a sentence using alliteration and as many fun nouns for their letter as they could.  This week we will be moving onto plural noun practice, both common and irregular.

Social Studies: we have spent some time learning about how the Statue of Liberty came to be on Liberty Island.  We have also learned about the history of Ellis Island.  We were able to see some video tours of both as well as have read several stories about the many brave immigrants that came through there as they settled in America.  We are now reading a book called, "Molly's Pilgrim" about an immigrant girl and the struggles she faced.  Watch for some homework this week on family history.

Math:  In math we have been working on a graphing unit.  We have worked and analyzed surveys with tallies, pictographs, bar graphs and pie charts.  We have also had fun graphing some second grade favorites in a large pictograph in the hall. 

Notes:

~The story sort is due Monday, February 6.  Students should do the best they can to find stories from each area.  I know you may not have each genre at home but do some exploring to see what you do have on your shelves.

 ~We will be celebrating Valentine's Day on Monday, February 14^th   with a small class celebration.   Students are welcome to bring valentines for their classmates but if they do choose to bring cards I ask that they include one for each student in our class.  Treats are not necessary.  I will send a class list to help students plan.

I look for ward to meeting with you this week at conferences! 

See you soon!

Dear Second Grade Families,

We have been so happy to be back in our cozy classroom and back to a normal schedule after the busy days of December.  Here is a look at what we have been up to.

In language arts we have started a new unit on the art of storytelling. As part of our unit the second graders will be looking at different story genres over the next several weeks. The genres that we will be covering are: tall tales, folk tales, fairy tales, myths, legends, fables and literary stories. We have read about storytelling and know that it is an ancient art of handing stories down from one generation to another.  We began by looking at folk tales, which are stories that belong to a particular culture.  They are often stereotypes of ordinary characters that have extraordinary experiences and they share a lesson or insight to that culture. As part of our unit, second graders will be learning their own story to perform.  This will be a step by step process that we will help them through and it will be shared with parents at a culminating event on Friday, March 11 from 9-10:15 so save the date!

In addition to storytelling we are studying nouns.  We are practicing identifying common nouns and will soon be doing some poetry writing with nouns.  We will also be looking at spelling plural nouns and using/writing proper nouns.

In social studies we have begun a unit on immigration and family heritage.  We have talked about how most Americans originate from other countries or that we are maybe even immigrants ourselves.  We discussed what it would be like to start a new life in a new country and some of the challenges immigrants face.  We will be reading many stories about early immigrants as they came to America and traveled through Ellis Island.  We will continue this unit and these discussions over the next several weeks.  There will be some small homework assignments concerning your family heritage as well.

In math we are well on our way to working on fractions.  Although students were introduced to them in first grade, we have built on the ideas and deepened our understanding.   We have learned the definition of a fraction, what the numerator and denominator is, and what happens to the size of the piece as the denominator gets larger. We wrote fractions in words and in numbers and have talked about adding like fractions.  We will be wrapping up fractions this week.

Here is an update from Ms. Selb on science...

In science, we are studying States of Matter. We have learned that everything in our world is made of matter. We've learned that there are three states of matter: solid, liquid, and gas. Solids have properties - things we can tell about them by looking at them or feeling them. This week in science we are exploring the properties of solid matter. We have sorted objects by common properties, and also learned that different properties are useful in different ways. We constructed towers out of solid objects and challenged ourselves to make them as tall as we could!

Conference notes were sent home today and are due back on Friday.

Please send some extra warm clothes to school for kids; hats, scarves, extra socks, fleece or sweaters.  We are out playing for 25 minutes or so and I like to bundle them up tight on these very cold days!