Hands On Nature

 

Firefly Second Grade spent this week finishing up some activities we have been working on and beginning new learning that we will continue with throughout the month of October.  We finished our first social studies/science rotation and switched groups for the next rotation.  We will continue with these groups through the middle of November. 

We finished up the first 20 Days of Writers Workshop discussing conferring, editing and publishing.  We also created a Firefly Published Works bin so we can share our published writing with our friends.  We will move into a non-fiction unit next week that ties into our math learning ,and will begin writing expert and specialist books.  Our Readers Workshop focused on inferring, visualizing, summarizing, synthesizing and finding big ideas in the text we read.  These are all things good readers do when they read.  We began Unit 3 in Fundations, which works on closed syllable exceptions.  Words that end in ild, old, ost, ind, and olt  and have long vowel sounds are all closed exceptions.

We continued our learning about ants during math this week.  We watched several video clips about ants on Discovery Education, and read and sang poems about ants.  The focus of this week's work was to learn as much as we can about ants before we dive into problem solving focused around ants next week.

We also enjoyed a Hands On Nature lesson about trees on Wednesday.  We learned about the life cycle of trees, tree parts and their purposes.  We talked about deciduous and coniferous trees, photosynthesis and tree growth.  We went outside and made many observations about trees.  A huge thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for helping us learn about trees!

Finally, a quick reminder that the month of October is Walk to School Wednesdays.  Have a great weekend!