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2 Grade News
Mrs. Ealy’s Class
November 16, 2012
Letter from Mrs. Ealy Next Week’s Specials
Dear Parents,
We have started our first science unit of the year and the Monday – P.E. (Wear Sneakers)
students love it! This unit is all about the properties of materials and Tuesday – No School!
mixtures. Science is such a great way for students to use higher level
thinking in the classroom. They have gotten to work in groups and use
problem solving skills and team work to come up with the answers. Our What We’re Learning About!
first lesson was about classifying and sorting different types of materials. Math – This week in math we played a review game to prepare for our
The kids have enjoyed feeling and describing the materials they are math test. We took the test on Tuesday. This was a much more difficult
familiar with and the ones they were introduced to for the first time. Next test for many students. Many students are still having trouble with
week we will continue to work on classifying as well as start the mixture counting coins, making change, and solving addition problems where they
portion. need to find the missing number rather than the answer. All of these
Today students received a new book and paper in their book n’ concepts will continued to be worked on in class, but please review your
bag. This book will not be due until Friday, November 30th. We have child’s test with them. Look for your child’s test in their OWL binder today!
been talking a lot about character traits this week during reader’s We also started unit 4 on addition and subtraction. We learned about two
different types of diagrams to help us solve addition problems. They are
workshop. A great way to get your child thinking more about any book is
called start to change and parts and total diagrams.
to ask them what traits they think describes the characters in the book.
Next week we will take it a step further in class by giving a reason why Reading – We have introduced a new addition to our reader’s workshop
we believe a particular trait fits a character. Ask your child to try this at this week. Students started writing in their reading response journals. This
home! week we started discussing character traits. Character traits describe how a
Next Tuesday will be our Thanksgiving snack. There will not character acts or shows their personality. Students are doing a really good
be a party, but simply a snack to celebrate what we are thankful for. I job with this concept. We are making sure that we aren’t describing what
sent home a reminder last week if you offered to donate something. the character looks like, but how they act. In our reader’s response journals
Please send in donations on Monday so I can prepare for the snack after we have been choosing a character from a book we read and listing three
character traits for them. Next week we will start working on picking a
school that day. Thank you!!
character trait and defending why we believe that trait fits the character.
During the month of December we will be working on a special
secret project in class. Mrs. Gerken and I are looking for wire hangers to Writing – We're in the final stage of our Authors as Mentors unit. We've
help with this project. If you have any to donate please send them in! spent some time learning how to vary our sentence structure by using
We greatly appreciate it and thank you in advance! commas and transitional words such as Suddenly, After breakfast, Later
Due to the short week next week there will be no newsletter that night. We've also experimented with varying our punctuation marks.
sent home or spelling. I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving Some of us are even using quotation marks appropriately (which is a 3rd
and break! If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me. grade skill!) Next week we'll think about which piece we want to take
Remember you can reach me by our folder, by email, or by phone. forward into publication. If you'd like to stop in and help us type our stories
as part of this publication, we can use some help on Wednesday, Dec. 5th.
Mrs. Gerken's class will need help from 11:30-12:30 and Mrs. Ealy's class
Sincerely,
will need help from 10:30-11:30. Please send in a note to Mrs. Gerken if
Mrs. Ealy you'd be able and willing to help. :) Thank you in advance.
• Please remember to return library books every Thursday! Our Daily Language Review (DLR) also plays an important role in our
• Please remember to send your child to school with a coat! writing. So far we've been working on contractions, possessives,
• Please help your child return their Book N’ Bag every Friday! capitalization, and punctuation skills as part of the DLR. Ideally those skills
Upcoming Events and Dates to Remember should transfer over into their writing.
Science – This week started our first science unit on physical properties.
Nov. 21-23 No School! Students were given a bag full of materials and worked in a group to classify
them by their feeling, weight, and whether they will float or not. We used
Dec. 3-7 Holiday Shop the same materials to classify them by either feeling hard and rough, hard
Dec. 7 Early Release Day and smooth, soft and smooth, or soft and rough. Last, we talked about
using our five senses in order to help us describe something. Next week we
Dec. 12 Mobile Dentist will start the part of the unit on mixtures 