Upcoming Dates to Remember:
October 13th: Indigenous Peoples’ Day, school closed
October 14th: Professional Development for Teachers, school closed
October 23rd: Field Trip to the New York Transit Museum
October 25th: LS Halloween Party
Reading
Students have been diving into a variety of texts and learning valuable skills to help them become more confident, independent readers. Here are some of the key concepts we’ve been exploring:
- Deciding How to Read: Students have discovered that they can choose different ways to read a book. They practiced using silly voices, news reporter voices, and other voices depending on the mood of the text.
- Giving Books a Sneak Peek: They’ve practiced looking closely at the covers, illustrations, table of contents, and a few pages to get a feel for what the book is about before diving in.
- Scooping Up Words and Phrases: We’ve focused on picking out ‘snap’ words and phrases that they can read easily, which helps them read longer phrases more fluently.
- Stopping to Think: Students have been encouraged to pause while reading to reflect on what they remember and can retell about the main events of the story.
We have continued to implement literacy work choices as a regular part of Reader’s Workshop. Students are learning to transition independently and to engage in open-ended literacy-based tasks that are connected to lessons in reading, word work, and writing. Students are creating their own phonics games, studying a selection of books, or using writing and drawing materials to respond to a prompt. Second graders are not only becoming stronger, more self-directed readers during this time, but they are also learning to rely more on their group mates to help them when they are stuck and to make plans as a team.
Phonics
During one of our recent Fundations lessons, we focused on when to use ‘k’ and when to use ‘ck’ to spell the /k/ sound. We learned that:
- Use ‘ck’ when the /k/ sound comes immediately after a short vowel, as in stick and block.
- Use ‘k’ when the /k/ sound follows a consonant, as in milk and task.
This rule helps us become stronger spellers and readers by understanding spelling patterns in words we use every day!
We also reviewed some previously learned trick words, including:
they, one, said, you, your, and was
And we added a few new trick words to our word banks:
shall, pull, and full
This week, we explored bonus letters and glued sounds during our phonics lessons. Bonus letters are extra letters that often come at the end of a word and don’t make an additional sound. You’ll see them in words like miss, spell, and puff, where the final letter is doubled but not pronounced separately.
We also began learning about glued sounds which are groups of letters that are blended together so tightly, they form a single sound. The first glued sound we introduced was -all, as in ball, call, and wall. Students were excited to add a brand-new “all” tile to their magnetic boards!
Writing
Our next writing unit is all about procedural writing: learning how to clearly explain how to do something, step by step. To prepare, students have been practicing important skills such as sequencing events, using transition words, and including plenty of details in their writing.
We kicked off the unit with a fun activity: students were asked to list the steps for making a sunbutter and jelly sandwich. Then, the teachers followed the directions exactly as written, paying close attention to the details… or more often, the missing details! Let’s just say, the sandwiches didn’t turn out quite as expected.
There were lots of laughs, but more importantly, the activity helped students see just how crucial it is to be specific and clear when giving directions. We’re excited to see what amazing how-to pieces our writers will create next!
Math
Second graders have been busy strengthening their understanding of addition and subtraction. Last week, we learned and played a game called Addition Tic-Tac-Toe, which combines addition practice, strategic thinking, and plenty of fun!
Through our study of fact families, students are discovering that addition and subtraction are inverse operations—meaning they’re closely connected. Using the same set of numbers, they can create related math facts such as 4 + 5 = 9, 5 + 4 = 9, 9 – 4 = 5, and 9 – 5 = 4.
Math got extra sweet this week! Using the same containers of candy corn that adults explored during Back to School Night, students practiced their estimation skills. Before guessing how many candy corns were in the mysterious “?” container, we warmed up with Steve Wyborney’s Pumpkin Esti-Mystery—a fun problem-solving activity where students estimate the number of pumpkin candies in an image and use clues to narrow down their guesses.
Students learned that an estimation is an informed guess—not just a random number! After sharing their first estimates, we organized everyone’s ideas on a number line from least to greatest. We discussed range, revised our estimates using new clues, and finally revealed the total by counting the candy corn in groups of ten (and a few leftovers). Of course, the best part came at the end—everyone enjoyed a few untouched candy corns!
As part of our problem-solving work, students read My Little Sister Ate One Hare by Bill Grossman—a funny, cumulative story about a girl who eats one hare, two snakes, three ants… all the way up to ten peas! Students calculated how many animals she ate in total (a whopping 55!).
This activity challenged students to extract information from a story, add multiple numbers, and stay organized as they worked. When they finished, students completed two extension tasks that pushed their thinking even further about addition and number organization.
We also began our October Calendar Math, exploring the month’s special dates while practicing skills such as identifying even and odd numbers and recognizing number patterns in the calendar.
Social Studies/SEL
In continuation of fostering a strong sense of community, students completed identity icebergs. The iceberg serves as a metaphor, underscoring that the tip of the iceberg is what we notice when we look at someone (i.e. hair color, clothing, tall vs short). However, there is so much more to us than that! There are so many things about a person that we don’t know until we take the time to learn more about them (the part of the iceberg that rests below the surface). Second graders got to fill in their own identity icebergs, labeling what someone might notice about them just by looking at them on the top portion of the iceberg and what someone would know only if they spent time getting to know them on the part of the iceberg that’s underwater. Students then had the opportunity to share their icebergs with some peers, allowing room to start conversations such as, “I didn’t know that you like ____.” This activity serves as an important reminder that we cannot judge a book by its cover and the importance of taking the time to get to know the people around us, so we can know the whole person (not just the tip of the iceberg).
Additionally, students learned how to use I-messages. I-Messages are statements given from the “I” perspective to communicate our needs and feelings. We explicitly teach this, so students have a framework to work from when they need to tell a friend they didn’t appreciate something they did. The messages follow this structure: “I felt __________ when you __________. Next time, __________.” For example, “I felt hurt when you said I couldn’t share the drawing book with you. Next time, please share with me.” I explained that sometimes friends don’t know they did something you didn’t like, and I-Messages help us communicate that. We spent time role playing both giving and receiving I-messages, understanding that it might be hard to hear that you’ve hurt someone’s feelings. Everyone did an incredible job in our role playing.
Lastly, we read the book “Niko Draws a Feeling” by Bob Raczka. In the story, Nico loves to draw. However, people don’t seem to understand his drawings. His drawings reflect the feeling or feelings he felt in a certain moment, not what was actually happening. This served as a nice way to introduce to the class our next SEL activity – layers of emotions. We discussed how we can feel more than one feeling at a time. The co-existence of two or more feelings might be overwhelming or even confusing. However, it’s a very normal experience. Students were asked to think of a time when they felt two feelings at the same time. Then, inspired by Nico, they were tasked with drawing those two feelings. We emphasized the importance of not drawing what happened in that moment, but what the feeling might have looked like. Everyone took this activity seriously, and 2J was so proud of their work. We ended our time with a fun share!
We also enjoyed several wonderful visits from Isabel. First, she taught us to mix different shades of brown from red, blue, yellow, and white. Then she taught us to mis our own skin tones. Most recently, Isabel came in to help us with drawing eyes, noses, and mouths. These activities are scaffolds for the self-portrait work we will be doing in the coming weeks.
