Welcome to the Web-page of Mrs.DeStefano's Second Grade Class of 2011-2012. AKA Tewksbury Tigers 

The main purpose of this web-page is to give you information on what we will be learning in the month to come. The current web-page  gives you information for January  2012  

A warm, and heartfelt thank you to everyone who helped our homeroom during the month of December to complete our stockings and assist with our Holiday Party.  Thank you to everyone for sending in a grab bag for the Holiday.  That was a lot of fun for all the students.  And finally thanks to all who provided food and drinks for that party. It was a huge success.

READING:  Each month I focus our reading thinking on one of 7 comprehension strategies. This month focus is on asking questions as you read.  We will be listening to our thinking as we come up with questions.  Good readers should be full of questions as they read so they are seeking to make sense of the story.  You can support this by asking your child what questions they have as they begin a book. Ask them what questions they have while they are reading the book.  Ask them if the question is a question that helps for the whole story or just at that moment.  We will also work on answering the questions we think of.  We will discover that not all questions are answered by the writing. Some questions get answered from our own thinking about what we read.  This is called inference.  We take a "guess" based on what we know from the story.  You can ask your child how they know the answer to their question.  Ask them what they read that made them think of that answer.  Kids like predicting but they don't always ask the question that goes with the prediciton.  That's OK but I want them to be aware of the power of asking the questions so it becomes a reading skill they use beyond my teaching.

WRITING:  We have explored the importance of having an ending that "wraps up" our stories. We looked at various ways authors can do this.  Now each child is expected to have a closing for each of their stories.  The latest writing techniques we are beginning to be aware of is that if we mention a setting we use that setting in our story.  If we say a forest, then things in a forest must occur in the story.  If we say a school then things that happen in a school must be woven into the story.  In addition to this we are learning that if we use non-human characters in a story then those characters must do things that they are known for doing. Such as making a story about rabbits.  They should be described as hopping about to get from place to place, not riding a bicycle. The goal is to make our writing visual and believable.

Writing for Questions:  This is a hard skill that we are now learning about.  The emphasis is on when writing an answer to a question, words from the question must be in the opening sentence.  The goal is to get 2 or more of the words from the question in your opening sentence.  Please hold your child accountable for this from now on when doing their homework and there is a question  that needs a sentence (or more) to answer it.

SPELLING:  In addition to vowel sounds and their expected patterns, we are now learning the spelling rules for adding suffixes onto words based on how they    are spelled.  Keep practicing the words that were in your child's spelling folder.   These are the words that your child uses that they need to learn to spell correctly. You can practice these while driving in the car, waiting to be served in a restaurant, waiting at the doctors, etc... Just practice them over and over until your child has mastered them.

MATH: Chapter 3 is done. Our next chapter is Chapter 4/5.  We will learn to add with regrouping.  Regrouping use to be called "borrowing", "carrying". It means adding on to next place value what is above the value of 9.  We will use beans, blocks and then move into just paper and pencil.  It is a concept that you and I take for granted as "easy" but is difficult for most second graders.  I give them time and a lot of support.

School Store: We have a classroom store that utilizes all the money concepts of second grade in a real life way. The items for the store are provided by donations from student families.  The items shouldn't be expensive. I purchase a lot of items for the store for $1 at Walmart, Dollar Stores and Micheal's.  It would be great if you can find some additional things to donate to our store. If you do just forward them to me in a bag marked "School Store Items."

SCIENCE: We are just beginning our unit in science on Motion and Force. Students will investigate through experimentation the forces that affect the movement of objects and the ways in which objects can move. It's a fun unit because it has so many experiments.

SOCIAL STUDIES:  We are now beginning a new unit in Social Studies. This unit will allow students to understand that the goods we use come from all over the world and the place in which something is created depends on the resources available in that region of the world. Students will also gain an understanding that the cost/speed of transportation also determines the location on the globe that something is manufactured. We will be using our newly aquired map skills to understand this unit's information.