Full Week of School!

Simchat Torah and Intro to Chumash

In honor of Simchat Torah we took a closer look at the school’s torah. We compared it to the small torah that we have in our classroom. Ask your child about the similarities and differences that they noticed. We also watched a movie about a soferet, a scribe, and to learn more about how she writes a torah. Lastly we connected our studies of the torah as a ritual object, to the study of Chumash which we are beginning this year in second grade. The students are so excited to discover this new subject which they know will culminate in our end of year Chumash Ceremony.

Hebrew: Sharing our Work in Reading Stations

Second graders have now finished their second long writing piece in Hebrew. When we finish a writing piece, we want to make sure that we can read and understand it, and are also excited to share our work with our classmates! In order to do all this, we divide into four stations. Students take turns reading their work aloud to a classmate. The listener must respond with either a question or compliment. Then the listener and reader switch. After both students have read, one of them rotates to the next station. In this way, each student gets to practice reading their writing out loud several times, and gets to listen to several different works as well. This has been a great way for us to work on our reading and listening skills. In the video below you can see the students doing this with a combination of independence and teamwork!

Reading our Hebrew Writing Aloud in Stations from Hannah Senesh on Vimeo.

Community Building

As the second graders are new to the first floor this year, we have been having third grade guests come lead morning meeting this week! The third graders create a morning greeting for the second graders, and share items from home to help the second graders learn more about them. It has been wonderful making new friends on the floor and having the third graders join our classroom community each morning.

Math

In math we looked at and practiced adding two and three digit numbers. We shared mental math strategies like “making ten”, where we break a number up into two numbers that would equal ten, and then add the rest of the numbers to that ten. For example, if the problems is 8+4=? We can break up the 4 into 2 and 2, then do 8+2=10, and 10+2=12. We shared different strategies with each other and we learned how to add vertically making sure to use our knowledge of place value. We are learning how to read and solve word problems and how to write equations. Some of the math manipulatives we use in class for better understanding are base ten blocks, 100’s charts and place value counters. Then we had a math movement activity: find the hidden math problems around the classroom! The second graders loved searching and finding the addition problems in the trickiest places!

Try this game at home! Make “up and down math” addition problems and hide them around the house with your child, then solve them together.

Reading

This week we delved into our word sorts. Some of us sorted words with the long vowel sounds, some of us sorted words with short vowel sounds, and some of us had a mix! We completed practice activities such as: writing our words 5 different ways, making word searches with our words for a buddy, drawing our words read the book Miss Rumphius by Barbara Cooney, and talked about how we can make the world a more beautiful place. Some responses included “helping the homeless with charity”, “being kind to others”, and “sharing things with people who don’t have a lot.” We illustrated this work with watercolors, and this will be displayed shortly on our bulletin board- make sure to come and check it out!

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Writing

This week in writing workshop we mixed science with writing. We were each given a shell and a magnifying glass and were asked to describe the shell. Many of us used colors, shapes, and textures to describe our shells. This is how we want to write or small moments- by zooming in on our small details and using dialogue, our senses, and sound effects to stretch and describe that moment. We all worked on adding more detail to our writing, and some of us have even begun our second or third stories!

Science

It was a busy week in science. We continued our investigations of matter, first reviewing how a solid turns to liquid from the previous week’s experiment with ice cubes and sharing their observations of some of the properties of solids and liquids. Then we conducted two experiments of liquids turning to gas. Before each, students had an opportunity to make predictions of what they thought would happen and why.

The second graders were so enthusiastic about the first experiment with water in covered and uncovered Petri dishes in various locations in the classroom that they eagerly checked them each day on their own and monitored the changes. The second experiment involved covering small cups of cool and warm water with larger cups. We recorded and drew our observations such as, “steam” or “clouds” which appeared on the inside of the larger cup over the warm water. Students also enjoyed conducting home experiments with freezing and thawing a watery food and wrote interesting observations as well as before and after drawings.

Ask your scientist about these experiments which will include an explanation of evaporation, various causes, and why water may not evaporate.