Week of November 6th

NEWS
Visiting author and illustrator Bryn Barnard came to visit grade 2 this week!  He shared some ideas about gathering information for his nonfiction books and illustrations and told the students about some interesting sea creatures!  This link has more information about him.

International festival both at Melawati on Friday and at Ampang on Saturday was a resounding success and always a great reason to gather and celebrate the many nationalities at our school. 

As readers this week we did some hard reading work taking our comprehension skills to the next level. Students learned how authors use literary language to help the reader picture things in their minds, describe characters and help give them a better understanding of what is happening. We noticed similes, alliteration sound words and some playful idioms that made students stop and question and have a few giggles.  We also worked on our fluency by practicing some reader's theater.

As writers we continued working on our lab report procedural writing with a few more science experiment. Students were testing ways to make liquids turn into gases with different heat sources. This week they wrote their lab reports independently applying the things they have learned as Science writers: detailed steps, using their senses to record observations and sharing their findings in their conclusions.

As mathematicians we continued our work into story problems. We continued practicing how to set up an equation with the known information and a symbol for the unknown with a focus on subtraction problems. We then used strategies such as number lines, drawing base ten blocks, manipulatives or other equations to show our thinking and writing the answer with the units.

As scientists we tried different ways to change matter from liquids to gases week. Some ways that the students explored were putting it on a bunsen burner, on the stove, and in the oven. We used a fixed amount of time (7 minutes) as a control and observed and recorded our results for how much water evaporated from each beaker and compared findings.

UPCOMING
Mini Academies (Monday, November 23rd) at 1:30pm - there is still time to sign up!

DINNER QUESTIONS
What was one interesting thing you learned from the author presentation?
How else could you try to make liquid evaporate?
What was something you did this week that was challenging? How did you figure it out?

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