I hope you all had a wonderful Thanksgiving! We are well into the month of October and the students have been working extremely hard here in Grade 2.  We have almost completed our Recount writing unit, and have been studying how to construct complete sentences which begin with an uppercase letter and end with punctuation.  The students are working on writing more complex sentences that end with question marks and exclamation marks, rather than simply using periods. 

We introduced our first set of Grade 2 Word Wall Words today.  Up until now, we have been reviewing the WWW from last year and determining which ones we still need to learn.  Each week, the children will copy their new words into their agenda (under the list section).  Part of the students' homework responsibility is to practice spelling these words often with you at home during the week in order to help them learn the spelling.  We will practice them in class in a different way from Monday - Thursday, and on Friday the students will have a quiz to see if they are able to spell them correctly. 

In Math, we are completing our Numeration unit.  We have been using the 200 chart to discover the patterns we see when we count by 2's, 5's, 10's and 25's.  They have been excited to learn that the patterns continue the same when counting from 100 to 200 and on.  This week we will continue to learn what it means to estimate, and focus on the concepts of more/less.

We are well into our Science unit on Simple Machines.  The students have learned the six different types of Simple Machines (inclined plane, wedge, wheel and axle, pulley, lever and screw) and have been busy discovering their uses and constructing them in class.  The children loved presenting their objects to the class today and I loved seeing them so enthusiastic! There are still a few to get through tomorrow.  If your child has not brought in an object to share with the class, please remind them to do so tomorrow.

A few housekeeping details:

Monday is our library day so please try and return books on this day.  The children are welcome to keep a book out for a second week if they are not done; they can simply return it on the following Monday.  This week we missed our library day due to the holiday, so please just return the books by Monday, October 16th.

The October homework calendar was sent home last week.  This calendar contains suggestions for activities you can do at home with your child.  The activities do not need to be returned to school.  A new calendar will be sent home at the beginning of each month. 

Last week, I sent home the student logins and passwords for Dreambox, Raz Kids and the students' gmail accounts.  Please send me a note if any of these are not working and I will investigate.

Please follow me on Twitter @liannelogan10 to see pictures of the in-the-moment activities happening in our class!