February

As the students are plugging away in Grade 2A, there are some important updates coming up.  A reminder that tomorrow, Wednesday, February 1st, is early dismissal at 2:15. Next week, there is no school on February 9th or 10th, as all the teachers will be attending teachers convention.  Report cards were distributed last Friday and we want to collect the envelopes so they can be re-used in June when the year end report cards get handed out.  If you could return the envelope, that would be greatly appreciated.

Language Arts

Phonics:

In our phonics workbooks, we have had a focus on specific sounds.  The students should now be able to differentiate between soft and hard "g" (giant - soft or game - hard) as well has soft and hard "c" (cent - soft or card - hard).  Usually a "g" or a "c" will make a soft sound if it is followed by an e, i, or y.  Does it follow the rule every time? No.  But for the most part it does. We also have looked at consonant blends, particularly blends with "r" and "l" (trip, block).  A blend is when 2 consonants go together but still make two letter sounds. We will also be studying consonant digraphs. A consonant digraph is when two consonants go together but make one letter sound.  (ch, sh, th, wh, ck). Our spelling words this week deal with "th" and "sh" digraphs.

Writing:

We continue to focus on writing complete sentences, making sure each sentence has a subject (who/what) and a predicate (doing/describing). Conventions are also very important, making sure to start each sentence with a capital letter and end with some form of punctuation; a period, a question mark, or an exclamation mark. The students also recently learned how to write and extended narrative story ending.  Some strategies for writing a great ending include using a memory about what happened in the story, expressing feelings about what happened, a hope or a wish as to what will happen next, or a decision based on the previous events and story problem. We will continue learning strategies to write detailed and complete stories over the coming weeks.  One of these strategies is showing feelings as opposed to telling feelings.  Students will learn that body language and facial expressions are indicators of how a person is feeling.  Authors will use language to SHOW rather than simply TELL about how a story character is felling.


Math

In math we have recently finished up our patterns unit.  We are now into our measurement unit.  The students are currently studying different measurements, such as length (height and width are forms of length), and mass.  We discussed how mass and weight are the same on earth but they have a different meaning.  We can use them interchangeably and the students are correct if they use one or the other to describe how heavy something is.  The students are also comparing lengths using words like longer/shorter, taller/shorter, and wider/narrower when comparing two objects.  We are also using non-standard units to measure length.  In grade two, we do not use standard units of measurement, such as centimeters and meters to measure, however we do talk about them so the students know that they are available and will always remain the same. We will continue to study measurement over the coming weeks.


Social Studies

I our first main unit in social studies, we learned about the land in the communities of Iqaluit, Meteghan, and Saskatoon.  In the next unit, titled Looking at People, we will focus on the people in the three communities, the Inuit, the Acadians, and the Ukranians. We will learn cultural characteristics that the members of each community will share, and learn different ways that traditions are passed on, such as through language, music, or art.


Science

We are into our third science unit, Exploring Liquids.  The students have had the opportunity do explore various liquids through their senses of touch, sight and smell.  We have looked at whether the liquids froze, evaporated, as well as their viscosity (resistance to flow). We have some very viscous liquids such as molasses and syrup, and some low viscosity liquids like water and vinegar. We will be looking at how water interacts with other liquids as well as how some solids react when being mixed with water (dissolving).  We will continue this unit through February before wrapping it up. The students have done some experiments as well dealing with surface tension (cohesion) of water and they are really enjoying it so far.



Don't hesitate to ask what your child is learning throughout the day.  We talk about how to explain what we are learning on a daily basis and to talk at home about what we are learning.  I hope everyone has a great week ahead.

Mr. Aasen