2A Ms. Tynan's Class

Update for April 23

Dates to Remember

Tuesday, April 24: Parent workshop on Math, led by Erma Anderson, 2:00 - 3:00 pm, SWEAT room
Wednesday, April 25: ES Assembly, 8:10- 9:00 am, MPH Grade 2 will be performing for Music class
Wednesday, April 25: ES Parent Coffee, 9:30 am, ES Workroom
Monday, April 30- Thursday, May 3: MAP testing in Grade 2. It is very important for your child to be at school each day next week.
Thursday, May 3: Early Dismissal at 11:30 am
Friday, May 4: No School

Literacy: We have been learning how we can identify character traits and infer information about how a character will solve a problem in a fictional story by noticing what characters say and do. After celebrating the publication of our fictional stories, we have moved on to a new unit in writing. A new genre, called literary nonfiction, has been introduced. It combines elements of fiction and nonfiction as it tells a story while giving facts and information about a topic. We have been exploring many different types of literary nonfiction texts and will start to write some of our own later this week.

Inquiry: Last week we started our inquiry into Sharing the Planet. We are focused on the diversity of the animal kingdom and how animals are an important part of our Earth’s ecosystems. The lines of inquiry are:
Characteristics of animal classification
Roles animals play in our ecosystem
Conservation of animal species
Animals adapt in order to survive

We have been learning about ways we can group animals based on their characteristics. Your child will be part of a research group that focuses in on one animal group and will help create a book to share their findings with our class.

Math: We are right in the middle of our unit on multiplication and division. Our focus is on learning strategies for multiplying and dividing groups of numbers, rather than the memorization of facts. For multiplication we have learned how to show our thinking using pictures, rectangular arrays, repeated addition, and open number lines. After finishing up our work on addition this week, we’ll move on to division.