Second Grade
By Mrs. Behrns and Mrs. Byrkit
April 23, 2010
This has been a very busy month in Second grade. Much has to be accomplished in order to complete all of our assessments. We have been working very hard to complete them.
Our task in Language Arts involved comparing and contrasting characteristics of folk tales. We read many and practiced finding things that were the same in each version of the folk tale and which things were different. Everyone learned to use a Venn Diagram in order to document our responses. The assessment results showed how much everyone enjoyed the project. The next task will be to practice narrative writing with a picture prompt using all of the writing strategies we have learned this year.
Dollars and cents, dollars and cents . . . These words have been heard in the second grade classrooms for several weeks now. All second graders are learning how to make change and compute money values with and without the calculator. Everyone is very good at identifying all of the coins and their values, so the next step is correctly making change. This is difficult, but everyone seems to be catching on.
Keyboarding is in full swing now and the second graders are really enjoying learning home row and proper posture for keyboarding. The program is set up so that the computers document where the students are in their practice and how many characters per minute they can type. Our goal this year is to have proper posture and keep our eyes on our copy and not our hands. So far we have had great success.
The computers were also used for our last Social Studies project as each student was required to research one of the fifty states and record some interesting facts about their state. The class loved listening to the state bird’s song and viewing the state flowers. They were also able to find some very interesting trivia about their chosen state.
As the year comes to an end we are amazed at how fast the time has gone and pleased with the accomplishments of our students. We have enjoyed learning and growing with them and look forward to watching them as they progress through the grade.
Mrs. Byrkit and Mrs. Behrns
