Second Grade Newsletter March/April
What's New!     Here it is already March!  It is hard to believe that we are swiftly approaching the end of the school year.  Our class is working hard to prepare for this transition.  Students have done an excellent job tackling the increased difficulty in school work.  Thank you for your support in helping your child be successful with this as well.  It is difficult to take on new challenges, such as increased homework, but positive attitudes make it much smoother.  We all have the same ultimate goal; that each child is prepared for the next academic year.     Science/Social Studies:       We are looking forward to our Living Museum early in March.  It will be exciting to see students dressed up as famous Americans and reciting speeches they prepared from their research.        We will be switching back to Science with a study of animals and habitats towards the end of March.  Students will learn many fascinating facts about animals during this unit.  Our study will include learning about: animal adaptations in different habitats, animal classifications, ecosystems, and the effects of pollution on animals and their homes.  As an enrichment to this unit we will also have two visits from the Houston Mobile Zoo and our annual Earth Day celebration in April.  What a treat!	Reading/Language: To correlate with our animal unit in science, all second graders will be choosing an animal from one of the habitats we study to research and write a paper on.  Students will be taken through a step by step process which will result in each student producing a research paper on his/her animal.  All of the reading, research, and note taking, will be done in class during our morning reading block.  Students will then take the information they have gathered and write a rough draft for a research paper which will include an introduction paragraph, three to four detail paragraphs, and a concluding paragraph.  Students will then bring home their rough drafts and type or rewrite a final copy at home.  Along with the research paper, students will be creating a diorama at home.  This diorama will display the animal your child has researched in its habitat along with other animals and plants that reside there.  (Please hold on to any shoeboxes for this project).  Each child will have the opportunity to present both the research paper and diorama to our class.  This is a tremendous accomplishment for our second graders and something they are very proud of when finished.

Math:

Thank you to all the parents who helped make Math Olympics in February a success.  Students had a blast participating in all the math “events.”  It was fun to correlate it with the actual Winter Olympics this year.  Looking forward into March and April we will be very busy in second grade tackling our next big units including; Adding and Subtracting Three Digit Numbers, Measurement, and Geometry, Fractions and Probability.  We will begin our final unit, Multiplication and Division, in late April or early May.  Even though we are moving along, please continue to practice and reinforce at home what your child has already learned, especially money and time.  These skills must be reviewed frequently so what has been learned will not be forgotten.