Welcome to second grade at East Elementary School! We are excited to have your child in our classes and we are looking forward to a great year. Please let us know if you have any questions or concerns throughout the year.

Behavior

We have a color card system to look for good behavior. We hope your child will work hard to stay on green!   Green - Great Day! Yellow - Lose 10 minutes of recess  Pink - Lose 10 minutes of recess  Purple - A note or phone call home  Blue - See the principal-

Reading

Everyday your child will have reading in a small group. We call this time IGR, Intensive Guided Reading. Your child will bring a book home to read each night. Please set aside a time and place for your child to read. After your child reads for at least 15 minutes, please sign their reading homework folder.

Writing

We will be writing daily in second grade and hope that you will encourage your child to practice writing at home too. Writing is a process that includes planning, a rough-draft, editing, revising and publishing. We will focus on the 6-Traits of Writing: Word Choice, Ideas and Content, Sentence Fluency, Organization, Conventions, and Voice. Students write in journals, create poetry, write to promts, write personal narrative and descriptive pieces. They construct responses to prompts and reading passages, write reports, friendly letters, create lists, take notes, and record observations.

Everyday Math

Our math instruction will build on what your child learned in first grade. We will work on addition, subtraction, fact families, story problems, geometry, place value, measurement, time, fractions, and the use of calculators. We encourage you to help your child with their math homework. We only send home math homework to review what was learned in class that day.

Science and Social Studies

In science we will be studying: Safety and Good Health Habits, Sun, Shadows, and Seasons, Dinosaurs and Fossils, Weather, and Plants. Our units in social studies include: Maps and Globes, Colonial Times, Celebrations Around the World, Pioneers and Old Littleton.

We use GLAD - Guided Language Acquisition Design, to teach and reinforce Vocabulary, Reading, and Writing,  throughout our units in Science and Social Studies. These are best practices for English speaking and ESL students.         

2nd graders learn about the Sun and shadows.

 Second Graders learn map and compass skills from the Colorado Mountain Club.

The 2nd Grade learns about dinosaurs and fossils at the

Denver Museum of Nature and Science

                                       April Newsletter

It is great to have everyone back to school, after a week of Spring Break. We have many exciting units of study this month. To begin with, the 2^nd grade will be going on a field trip on Tues. April 22nd to the Littleton Historical Museum to learn about the Pioneers who first settled in Littleton. We will compare and contrast how the community of Littleton has changed in the last 100 years.

        We are sharpening our Writing skills by writing narrative stories and poems. We are stretching our ideas by describing characters, the setting, the plot, and the conclusion, using good word choice and action verbs. The 2^nd graders will be taking a LPS District Writing Assessment in May, to measure our progress in our Writing Skills – Ideas and Content, Word Choice, Organization, Sentence Fluency and use of Conventions, Spelling, Capitalization, and Punctuation.

        In Everyday Math, we will solve story problems using money, learn how to make change, study place value of numbers through 1,000, and solve multiplication and division number stories.

        We hope to see you at the Celebration of the Arts on Thurs., April 24^th. The student’s art and class books will be on display. It is such a wonderful evening to come and see the student’s finest work. Hope to see you there!

        Thank you for continuing to support your child’s education!

        Sincerely,

        The 2^nd grade teachers

        Mrs. Smith, Miss VanderVelde, and Miss Salzman