There is no school for students on Friday January 30^th. Since there is no school on Friday our spelling test is on Thursday this week.

The grade 2’s are excited that they have an opportunity to be part of Dance Club this year. Some students took home permission forms yesterday. No prior experience is necessary, but students need to be committed to attend lunch hour practices in order to be part of the club.

In Math we are continuing to learn about addition and subtraction to 18. Please work at home practicing Math facts with your child. Dollar stores often carry flash cards; this is a simple and fun way to build up your child’s mental Math skills. At school we practice using a variety of different strategies to solve addition and subtraction equations. We use number lines, counters, 10 frames, fact families, and sometimes we even draw pictures to help us understand what a question is asking.

We have been working on missing piece addition. Knowing fact families really helps us to do these types of questions. A missing piece addition question might look something like this ___ +7=13. We know that these numbers can be moved around as they are part of a fact family. This means we can rewrite the question and use subtraction to help us find the missing number. Our new question becomes 13-7=___. Then from there we are able to do subtraction to figure out the missing piece. We may also see questions that look like this 4+___=8. Again we can turn it into a subtraction question 8-4=___ and then we can figure out the missing piece. Here is a link to a website that we enjoy using during computer time. Without a membership you are able to do a limited number of Math questions every day, but if you are looking for a little extra practice at home this is a great place to start! http://ca.ixl.com/math/grade-2/complete-the-addition-sentence-one-digit

We are having so much fun inferring in our reading! Today we worked in groups reading four different stories on iPads. We had to really use our inferring skills today because some of the stories were kind of strange. One of the stories was about cows, another was about some parents acting really strange, another one of the stories was about seeing things like boulders moving and snow that was really newspaper, and the last story was about people waiting for a train that was delayed. As we read each of the stories we began to notice similarities between them. We suspected that Mrs. Normand was playing some kind of trick on us because she asked us to read all four of them! We were right; the trick was that all four stories were related to each other.

If you get a chance to ask us about it we would love to tell you more. If you want to read the stories (and story…as we learned all of them make up one story) for yourself the book is called Black and White and it was written by David Macaulay. We really enjoyed reading it and know you will too!

Mrs. N