Instruction Suggestions

Dear Parents/Guardians,

This is definitely new territory for all of us! Thank you so much for reaching out and for working with your children at home. First and foremost, I suggest keeping a routine that is as consistent as possible, limit screen time, find time to connect with your child, involve your child in daily activities (cooking, for example), and give them the chance to explore, play, and be kids. Below you will find a list of suggested activities you can do during this time. Please do not feel pressured to complete everything. I am sending a general list for this week. If you prefer daily suggestions, would like other resources, or tips on how to work with your child on specific skills, please reach out. I am here for you and the students!

Resources
I personally searched each and every one of these websites to ensure they are indeed free. If any site you come across requests credit card information, even for a "free trial," I recommend you do not sign up. There are plenty of FREE resources available. If you would like a resource to address a specific need please let me know. 

www.brainpopjr.com  This website is paid for by our campus. It has videos and interactive activities with a variety of topics. 
username: wlab
password: bpop

www.mycapstonelibrary.com  Digital library - Books have audio
username: wilkinson
password: read

www.pebblego.com  Non-fiction library - Mainly social studies and science topics - Books have audio
username: wilkinson
password: read

www.coloringsquared.com  Math fluency practice - Pages will have to be printed - Please stick to addition, subtraction, and place value pages. Avoid multiplication and division.

www.prodigygame.com Math practice - The students have to advance to different levels. If they do not remember their login from the computer lab, they can create a new login. Parents can monitor progress through a parent portal.

www.storylineonline.net  A library of books that are read aloud by famous people.

kids.nationalgeographic.com  Many interactive topics for students. 

kids.sandiegozoo.net Basically a virtual field trip. Interactive games and topics for kids.

**I did not search every website from the image below, so if any request credit card information, please do not sign up unless you feel it is necessary.**

Suggested Activities by Subject 

Reading - 

If the students do anything this week, reading is the most important. They can read to themselves, you can read to them, or they can access any of the digital libraries I have mentioned above. I do realize not everyone has access to books at home or internet, so do not panic if this is not possible. If I can support your child in any way with books, please message me. 

Writing - 

The students can free write. They love to have free choice of utensil! Encourage them to write a story with a beginning, middle, and end. Remind them of capitals, punctuation, and capitalizing the letter I. Encourage them to WOW you with how much they can write. They love to show off their "author's craft!" Feel free to take a picture and send me any of their writing pieces. I will do my best to provide feedback. The students can also write me letters. If you do so via e-mail, I will respond to them. My e-mail is kestes@conroeisd.net. 

Writing Topic Ideas: (These are just suggestions. If the students already have ideas they want to write about then allow them to select their own topic.)

Write about your Spring Break. 

Write a small moment story of one thing that happened over Spring Break. 

Write a letter/email to Mrs. Estes.

Write an imaginative story.

Write a "How To" story explaining how to do something. (Make a sandwich, check out a book from the library, brush your teeth, etc)

Write an "All About" story about a topic they are passionate about. 

Write a persuasive/opinion piece about their favorite place. Remind them of the OREO - State your opinion, give reasons and examples, and end by stating their opinion again.

Math - 
The students can work on telling time, counting money, addition/subtraction with and without regrouping. We recently moved to 3-digit numbers when adding or subtracting, but they will only have to regroup in 1 place. For example, 428-152 would be an appropriate problem because they only have to "borrow" one time. 428-159 would be beyond what they have learned so far as they will have to "borrow" twice. I will also attach a previous Math Review to the e-mail version of this that they can work on daily.

Cursive - 
We have started to learn cursive. The students can practice writing their name. If you go to www.instantworksheets.net you can search individual letters for the students to practice. At this time, they are only focusing on letter formation. Example: in the search bar you can type "lowercase cursive a" and it will bring up a worksheet.

I hope this provides guidance for those wanting to work with the students at home. Once again, if I can help in any other way please let me know. Just a reminder, these are suggested activities, not required. Thank you for being flexible!

Sincerely,
Mrs. Estes

Reading- Tricky Words & Partners

We’ve spent a lot of time this week learning strategies to help us when we come to “tricky words” in our reading. We’ve also spent quite a bit of time working on reading in partners. We’ve put in  a lot of work to make sure our time with our partners is productive. The students have been using post-its during reading to “stop and jot” to help them retell and reinforce their comprehension as well as to track “tricky words.” We’ve practiced many strategies including using pictures to help us, searching for words within a word, reading the word part-by-part, cover up the word and guess a word that would make sense, and more.

We’ve also spent time focusing on vowel teams and the endings of words such as -ing or -ed.
Vowel teams are words that have ea, ee, oo, ou, and so on, which often fall in the middle of a word. Even though these words use the same letters, they don’t always make the same sound. We’ve practiced these sounds to figure out which sound would fit different words best.
For example:
ea- head vs beach
ee- feet vs been
oo- boot vs book
ou- shout vs should


I encourage you to have your child share any vowel teams, endings, or tricky words they discover while reading!

2nd Grade Fun!

It has been a fast and furious start to our school year together. We have jumped right into our learning. I intend to use this blog to keep you updated on what is going on in the classroom. Feel free to scroll back to previous classes I’ve taught to see what kind of activities we’ve done in the past. I find the blog an effective way to connect what we’re doing in the classroom at home. Use this resource as a way to ask your child what we’re doing in the classroom, apply what we’re doing at home at school, etc. I hope you find this blog useful! Below is a summary of a few lessons we’ve done  so far.



We worked on what’s called “Stop and Jot.” We practiced stopping while reading, thinking about what we read, and retelling what we’ve read to ourselves. Stop and jot is a strategy students can use to jot quick notes to remind them what they’ve read. Their jot can be a short phrase, a picture, a symbol, and so on. They seem to love this strategy! When reading at home, encourage them to give it a try and share their thinking with you.

We’ve had a few students begin to teach the class during our morning Math Review. They’ve blown me away so far with their teaching skills.

Rather than myself categorizing the books in my library, I took some time to allow the students to categorize our classroom library in a way that makes sense to them. This also gave the students the opportunity to explore what kind of books are in the classroom library. Each student was given a giant bag which is their “shopping bag.” Each week the students will shop for their books for the week. The first week we started with 7 books. We’re focusing on how to select just right books by reading the blurbs on the back, doing a 5 finger test (if you open a book, read a page, and find that 5 or more words were too challenging to read, then a different book might be a better option), and what kind of books they find interesting. We’ve shopped one time so far and the students seemed to love it!

Volcano Experiment!

It feels like forever since I last posted. The app I use to blog has given me trouble all year, but I was determined to make this post. Today the students got to build volcanoes! They've been looking forward to this experiment pretty much all year and today was the day their dreams came true! We related the volcanoes to our rapid changes science unit. We discussed how our volcanoes are similar and different to real volcanoes. The students should understand how a volcanic eruption changes the land around it. We've also been talking about landslides, tsunamis, tornadoes, earthquakes, and floods. The students have been really engaged with this unit. Encourage them to share something new or interesting they have learned!

**The students got their hands dirty to build the volcano, but there were strict rules in place that they were not to touch the volcano after the baking soda and vinegar were combined to create the eruption.

Common Assessment

The students will take a math common assessment on Thursday, December 1. It will consist of 12 questions and review multiplication, addition and subtraction paired number tables, and personal financial literacy. We completed a reviewed a study guide in class. Please review this with your child. A blank version is shown below with examples of class anchor charts that can help them. Thank you for your support!

Expanded Notation & Number Lines

This week we continued working on composing and decomposing numbers, but to higher place values. The students also learned about expanded notation which they seem to love! Expanded notation is basically just separating the digit from its place value.

Expanded notation example:

12,567= (1x10,000)+(2x1,000)+(5x100)+(6x10)+(7x1)

I created a game where they roll a dice to create a 4 digit, 5 digit, or 6 digit number and then they represent that number in expanded notation. The students have been loving it! Challenge them at home to show you an example and teach you what they learned. 

We also began focusing on number lines. One thing I have noticed is as a whole we struggle with skip counting past 100. For example, the students count by 10s well, but when we get to 100, rather than connecting that the pattern continues to 110,120,130,etc, the students will switch to ...80,90,100,101,102,103,etc. I've been working on trying to build these patterns, but you can help at home too. For example, you can challenge your child to count by 10s from 100-300. (I definitely don't recommend starting at 0 and doing this all the way to 1,000 due to time, but even chunking numbers will help!) This is also helpful past the thousands. Example: Count by hundreds from 1,000-2,000 which would be 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, etc.

We did a number line activity where I passed out numbers and the class had to figure out where they belong on a number line which is easing us into the idea of rounding. We will focus a lot on the number line to help with rounding. For example, 34 is between 30 and 40, but on the number line you can see it is closer to 30 than 40. I like to use the example of miles on the road. If you were driving and your family's car ran out of gas at mile 34. Would you rather walk 4 miles back to the 30 mile exit or 6 miles to the 40 mile exit to get gas? This is a real world connection that seems to help them! We start by placing numbers correctly on a number line simply because that is a prerequisite to eventually be able to round mentally.

*The clothes pin number line collapsed once we finally placed our numbers, so I quickly improvised and threw tape on the ground and we placed them that way. It was pretty funny!

If you have any questions please let me know!

Place Value

This week we have focused on place value and the relationships between two place values. The students have learned a lot of new vocabulary.

Compose - to join sets or numbers

Decompose - to break down sets or numbers into smaller sets or numbers

Value - the amount a digit is worth based on its place in a number

Digit - the symbols used to create a number (0,1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9)

At the beginning of the week we composed and decomposed numbers different ways. 

Later in the week we focused on place values past the thousands place. The students learned more about the thousands place, ten thousands place, and hundred thousands place. We even built ten thousands using place value blocks and pictures of place value blocks. We focused on the relationship of place values with their next door neighbor. For example: The tens place is 10 x larger than the ones place because ten ones create a ten. The hundreds place is 10x greater than the tens place and it takes ten tens to create one hundred. We focused on patterns and how to read larger numbers. I'm working on the students not saying the word "and" when they read a number. For example: 12,335 is read as "twelve thousand, three hundred thirty-five," NOT "twelve thousand, three hundred and thirty-five." This will help the students when they learn decimals in 4th grade. 

First, we started by creating ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten-thousands with blocks as a class. 

Then, I sent the students back to their seat to complete their "job." Each student was responsible for cutting it certain place value blocks and then as tables we constructed one thousand. As a class, we created a chart to show ones, tens, hundreds, thousands, and ten thousands. We did not create hundred thousands, but we talked a lot about them! 

This was the end result! I hung it on the wall after and we will use it as an anchor chart the rest of the year. 

It is so helpful to find real world examples of numbers in your every day life and point them out... Especially up to the hundred thousands place. We discussed real world connections, but pointing them out to your child will help make their learning more meaningful. Even sharing your thought process of doing mental math is helpful. For instance, when you go to the grocery store, share how you calculate the amount you are spending, share how you use mental math to find an estimate, etc. If you discuss these with your child encourage them to share what they discovered with me in class!