Oh, we had fun on April Fool's Day! Mrs. J.-R. wrote Monday, April 4, 2016 on the
whiteboard and could not be convinced by students that the date was actually Friday,
April 1,2016. Still, disbelieving students tried to fool their teacher all day long. Imagine that!
Now that it's early spring, Maine's 31,000 black bears are emerging from their winter dens. That's a lot of bears! Occasionally, they are spotted in Kittery, so bear-proof your garbage and trash. There's a reason for the expression "...hungry as a bear!" It's recommended to delay putting out your bird feeders until later in the spring, because they're a major bear attraction. The birds will be fine. As things "green up", the bears will look for food in the woods--not in your yard. Students have been doing black bear research on the Maine Secretary of State Kids' Page. They've been reading and practicing taking notes in preparation for doing a report on the Maine black bear. The information will go in their handmade books on the state of Maine.
Students are practicing fluency while reading and refining summarizing skills--learning to include key details from the beginning, middle, and end of a story. Parents, ask your second grader what being a fluent reader sounds like, and ask him/her to demonstrate by reading a "just right" book out loud to you.
This month we finished up Unit 7 in Everyday Math. Besides on-going practice moving towards automaticity with basic addition and subtraction facts (keep practicing at home, please), students have been polishing skills rounding numbers to the nearest decade number, solving 2- and 3-digit addition and subtraction problems with and without regrouping, and both filling in and interpreting data on line plots.
Finally, we've been reviewing various vowel digraphs in class such as "ai" "ei" "ea" and r-controlled vowels "ir", "er", and "ur".
Spring vacation this month--we're ready!!!
