To go along with the respect week theme, we read a story called "The Ugly Pumpkin." The pumpkin in the story does not look like the rest of the pumpkins and is not treated fairly because of it. In the end, the pumpkin realized that he was not a pumpkin at all. That, in fact, he was a squash. We discussed how it feels when you get "squashed." The students wrote about a time when they felt squashed and then they created their own ugly pumpkins.
This week our essential question was "How do we care for animals?" We discussed our pets and how we care for them. We learned about the different kinds of veterinarians. We read a story about how a girl became friends with a rhino. Our focus is spelling was long a words and short a and we did a lot of practice making words with these sounds. We also learned to identify root words that have inflected endings like -ed and -ing.
In math this week we started something new. We started using more technology in our math lessons. We concentrated this week on numbers and different ways to read and write numbers. We learned how to write numbers in expanded form and word form. Next week we will be practicing counting by ones, fives and tens.
We finished up our unit on the three communities today. We did a survey of which community the students would to choose to live in and the winner was...suburban. In science, we discussed the motion of spinning. We tested this motion by creating twirly birds. We took our twirly birds outside to identify which force helps our twirly birds fly.
Lastly, we had a special visitor to our classroom this week named Shadow. Shadow is a bat who flies around and plays at night with his twin brother (also named Shadow) in the other second grade class. He's been leaving us letters everyday. The students have been practicing their letter writing by writing letters back to Shadow.
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| Here's Shadow hanging from our ceiling fan. |
Don't forget...there is no school on Monday. Have a great long weekend.
