Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!!

I just wanted to take this time to wish all of my families a very Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! I am so grateful to work and live in a community of people that care about each other and the children's education.

Enjoy your holiday break. Make fun memories together.

Love,
Mrs. Wells

Polar Bear Week

This week the second graders have been researching polar bears.  They listened to books and used the internet to find many facts and interesting information about them.  Did you know that polar bears have 42 teeth?  They put the information they gathered into a polar bear report.

Our memoirs in writing are finally complete.  Thank you for sharing your stories and making this a fun experience for the students.  They took a lot of pride in telling the stories about their loved ones.  

In math we are continuing to subtract.  We are moving toward learning how to regroup when subtracting. (I'm sure you are all thrilled about that!)  

This week in science, with the help of our FABULOUS technology teacher, we created a video about the golden lion tamarin.  This video will be shared with the rest of our school to teach them about the animal we have chosen for our campaign for the UNLESS contest.  When the final copy is ready, I will provide a link to parents who may be interested in seeing it.  Thanks Mrs. Selby.

In social studies, the students have been learning about different Christmas customs around the world.  This week they learned about the Netherlands and England.

Our elf had a bit of a war this week with the Grinch.  But, by the end of the week they appeared to be friends again.  

Christmas Around the World

This week Mrs. Taylor's elf traveled to both Germany and Italy and taught us about the Christmas customs in both countries. In Germany, people put a pickle on the Christmas tree and the person who finds it gets to open the first present.  In Italy, LaBefana is an old woman who delivers gifts to children.

We read poems this week in reading about animals and why we love them.  We read about camels, bats, and turtles.  We practiced finding key details to support the main topic.  We also used clues to define multiple meaning words.  

In math, we learned some more subtraction strategies. We will be having a test next week on the strategies we have learned so far.  

Our classroom elf, Candy Cane, has been up to no good.  He put a mustache on the Grinch this week.  I don't think the Grinch liked it very much because he got him back today.

Skype Session

This was an exciting week in second grade.  We have begun work on the UNLESS project sponsored by the Philadelphia Zoo.  We choose our focus animal: the Golden Lion Tamarin and our cause: water conservation.

On Tuesday, the second graders received a Skype call from Brad from the Philadelphia Zoo.  He told us all about the project.  Then he told us all about the four focus animals that are endangered.  We learned about the guam kingfisher, the rodrigues fruit bat, the panamanian golden frog and the goldne lion tamarin.  He gave us information about how climate change and deforestation are destroying the areas where these animals live.  He then answered our many, many questions we had about the project and the golden lion tamarin.  Stay tuned to see our progress.

This week our essential question was "How are offspring like their parents?"  We learned about such animals as penquins, wolves, gorillas and eagles and how they take care and look like their young.  We focused on finding the main topic and the key details.  We practiced defining multiple-meaning words and the suffixes -ful and -less.  

The students began working on their memoirs from the stories they were told by their family members.  Thank you for you participation. 

We started subtraction this week using similiar strategies that we learned for addition.  Please keep in mind that again with subtraction we will be learning several strategies to subtract.  Some students may struggle with one strategy but thrive with another one.  That is to be expected.  

Probably the most exciting news this week is that our classroom has been visited by an elf.  

As you can see, he did not have a name so this morning each students put a name on a piece of paper and the name that was randomly drawn was:  Candy Cane.  So, welcome to our classroom, Candy Cane!!