January 27 in Room 11

• Happy Birthday to Teron!
• Music today!
• Students worked with a partner to complete a comparison chart of this week's two reading stories.
• Regrouping and related concepts still occupy the most Math time, energy and thought in grade two. Getting a sense of numerical place value is a difficult and important concept that many of the students are only now beginning to understand. Their parents were expected to memorize the operations of borrowing and carrying. Today's second graders are taught to understand what process is actually happening when a number is changed, or moved from one column to another.
• Parents are reminded to have their children read as part of their homework Monday through Thursday evenings, and return their parent-signed reading charts to school on Friday.
• Teachers in Room 11 will soon be contacting people who wish to help with the Valentine's Day party.
• Students finished their shore bird projects this afternoon. Our Sandy Beach mural is alive with creatures who live along the shoreline!
• The class began a writing project about their school community. They brainstormed ideas about what work teachers do. They will be writing sentences about the work students do in their classroom and what kinds of things are expected of second graders at Hillcrest. when those sentences have been collected, they will organize their ideas and write them on one paper to make an essay about school community life.