This week we are focusing on the life and contributions of Martin Luther King Jr. Students learned the meaning of segregation and why keeping groups separate was wrong. We learned that Martin Luther King Jr. was an activist who believed that change could happen through peaceful marches, speeches, and sit-ins. He did not want people to use violence to promote change. We learned that Martin Luther King Jr. was an important leader of the civil rights movement. Ask your child to explain civil rights in his or her own words.
Grade One | Grade Two |
First graders are learning strategies for solving change or addend unknown problems in math. We are learning the RDW (read, draw, write) process for solving real world mathematical problems. For example, “Maria has 15 baseballs, 8 of them are old, and some of the are brand new. How many brand new baseballs does Maria have? Students apply the addition and subtraction strategies they’ve learned to similar problems. Then, they highlight the important information and draw a picture to help them solve the problem. Next, they write a number sentence and box the solution. Finally, they write a complete sentence answer for the problem. We are reading The Green Fern Zoo which introduces students to all different types of animals, from mandrills to puffins. While the main character in the book is a fictional character, the information in the book is factual, making this an informational text. Ask your child about some of the animals in the book. In addition, we are learning to identify nouns and verbs. Students have learned that every sentence contains a verb and that the verb is the action word in the sentence. We learned that there are past, present, and future tense verbs. Also, we discovered that we can make many verbs past tense by adding “ed” to the word. The sound “ed” makes changes based on the word. Ask your child what sound “ed” makes in lifted, helped, and smiled. While learning about syllables, we found out that a syllable may contain several consonant sounds, or it may have no consonant sounds. A syllable, however, must always contain only one vowel sound. Therefore, every word has the same number of vowel sounds as it has syllables. We practiced clapping syllables and identifying the vowel sounds in words to figure out the number of syllables. | Second grade students began a new domain on Cycles in Nature. This domain will introduce your child to the many natural cycles that make life on Earth possible. This week students learned about the cycle of daytime and nighttime, as well as why intense sunlight is so important to life on Earth. Students learned that a cycle is a sequence of events that happens over and over again, and that the rotation of the Earth causes daytime and nighttime. Ask your child to explain in his or her own words how the rotation of the Earth causes daytime and nighttime. Also, second graders learned how the tilt of the earth affects the amount of sunshine we receive as it orbits the sun causing the changing of the seasons. This week our math lessons have focused on adding and subtracting within 100 using concrete models. As we added two-digit numbers students use place value disks to physically make 1 hundred using 10 tens, and 1 ten using 10 ones. When subtracting students again used place value disks to physically decompose 1 ten into 10 ones so they would have enough ones to subtract. Doing these operations with concrete objects helps students understand why we regroup tens and ones. Also, it helps build students’ understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction. We did a mid-module assessment on Friday. |