Week ending 12/2/16

Hello Families!
I hope everyone enjoyed their longer weekend last week and it's back to business in our classroom!

Important information:

• Thursday, December 8, is an early release day with dismissal at 12:30.  
• Heritage Bears are due on Friday, December 9.  
• We continue to go out at recess so please be sure your child has a jacket and anything else necessary for the weather. 
• As the 2nd grade team begins to think about field trips in the Spring, we want to let you know that to even be considered for a field trip, you must be CORI'd and have a current one on file.  This is very important but easy to do.  You can do this by seeing Ms. Sheehan in the office.  Please do this month if you need to.

3, 2, 1 things we've worked on this week.  

3 social studies activities we worked on were brainstorming and sharing what we thought we knew about the United States of America and what we wanted to learn about, learned about important landmarks in our country, and began to learn a little bit about our Constitution.  

2 reading workshop activities we worked on were completing our writing of our own book about non-fiction features and then sharing the books with our peers.  Ask your child to tell you two non-fiction features and their purpose. 

1 homework we've sent home is Heritage Bears.  Here's the scoop...

As part of our Social Studies curriculum, we will soon embark on a journey to learn more about a few of the many countries and cultures that make up our world.  The Heritage Bear Project is designed to help students reflect on their own cultural heritage and help them make connections to the world cultures we will study for the remainder of the year.  The project also helps us celebrate the diverse cultures that make up our classrooms.
Templates for the heritage bear project went home this week.  Please work with your child to cut out and "dress" the bear template in a way that reflects the traditional clothing of your child's heritage.  Be creative.  Use scraps of fabric, ribbon, or paper to collage together an outfit if you can. You should only dress the front of the bear.  Please help your child to complete the bear's fact card which also went home.  Thank you!

Here's some pics of us working on our new math unit, Measuring for the Art Show. We've measured paper with cubes but today we worked on using our ten strips we made and measured with that.  It's important we work as a team when measuring and that we remember our strategies for measuring carefully.  This unit will help us build on our knowledge of place value and we will use an open number line to show our addition strategies.