Money Masters

Hi Families-

We've had a super week of learning here in Room 17. This week, we continued our work with coins and money problems. We have mastered counting collections of mixed coins and are now working on story problems that involve money. We know the symbols that are used with dollars and cents and what the decimal points means when talking about money. Here is a quick peek at a money scavenger hunt that we did as a class.

This week in writing, we continued to elaborate in our book nominations. We have learned that we can make our book nominations longer, stronger and more convincing by comparing our book to other books that aren't as deserving and by adding quotations right from our text that show evidence for our opinions. Next week we will choose one nomination to edit and fancy up for an upcoming writing celebration!

Don't Forget!
- You will find your assigned parent-teacher conference time in your child's Friday Folder. I look forward to seeing you all next week!
- If you have access to copier paper boxes that you will not be needing, the second grade is collecting them for a social studies project! Please send them our way.

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Final week of Taiko Drumming
- Giving advice for second grade readers
- Close to 25 Cents
- Picking a state to research
- Fifty Nifty United States
- Clementine

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly

Celebrating Differences

Hello Families-

We've had a wonderful week here at Rick Marcotte Central School. This week, we had some amazing opportunities to celebrate all sorts of learning. On Monday, the second grade class celebrated Disability Awareness Day. During this experience, students were given tools to help them experience four different disabilities: learning disability (dysgraphia) by wearing socks on their non-dominant hand and trying to complete a drawing; hearing impairment by wearing noise canceling headphones and then trying to follow a set of verbal directions; visual impairment by wearing a blindfold and using a probing cane and a peer to navigate a maze; and physical limitations by wearing socks over their hands and trying to do fine motor tasks like buttoning shirts or putting beads on strings. The goal of this day was to gain empathy for those with different abilities and the strengths and challenges they face every day. Here are a bunch of pictures from this day:

The second grade was also thankful to have the fabulous PTO sponsor Ms. Nancy coming in to teach us Math Through Art. In our first lesson, we looked at different geometrical shapes, and then each student created a riddle. These riddles contained three shapes that followed a rule and one "rule breaker". Then, they used art to share their geometrical thinking. Here is our math work:

This week in Farm-to-School, we learned about the cocoa bean and all that the hard work it takes to make chocolate. We then got to learn about a healthier version of chocolate- cacao! We used cacao and some maple syrup to make a delicious, healthier version of hot chocolate.

Reminders:

In your child's Friday Folder is a bright orange piece of paper that is a sign up for Spring Parent Teacher Conferences. I hope to have these forms back Monday so that I can coordinate sibling conferences. Thank you!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:

- Writing book award nominations

- Moving to book clubs that work on goals

- Counting mixed collections of coins

- Edges, Vertices and Faces of 3-D shapes

- Horton Hears a Who whole school celebration

Have a wonderful week,

Kelly

Taiko Drumming

Hello Families-

We have had a fabulous week of learning here in room 17. This week in social studies, we began our study of the United States of America. We learned the cardinal directions and used them to navigate our way through a map of the United States. Over the next few weeks, we will be learning how to read many different types of maps and learning their purposes. We will also be zooming in and doing a short-focused research project on one state. Our culminating project will be a float in our US Parade. We are looking for the donation of cardboard copy paper boxes to use for this activity. We would accept with appreciation any boxes!  Here's a peek at our work with atlases.

We began our work Taiko Drumming with Paton Sensei this week. We learned about the country of Japan, some things about school in Japan and some Japanese words. We have been practicing our drumming skills and are learning a piece for our performance. Look our for the notice from Mrs. Rito with the date and time of our celebration.

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Coin names and values
- Adding sections and pages to our opinion writing
- Reading in same-book partnerships
- Mystery Doug!
- Setting up our "checking" and "savings" accounts in our base ten bank

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly