2nd Grade
January 2024
Happy New Year!
We hope you have had a wonderful holiday season and are ready to dive into the new year with lots of learning!
Please continue to support your child(ren) by reading through the January Newsletter carefully. With your ongoing help, we hope to set up all of the second graders for success!
We mostly communicate via Dojo, so please make sure you’re connected! 
Book of the Month:
Click here for more information and activities that you can do at home!
Theme: Inclusion, Friendship & Belonging
Student-of-the-Month Characteristics:
→They recognize how others are feeling and imagine how they would feel if they were in a similar situation.
→They show care and concern for their peers.
→They realize that someone else’s feelings may be different from his/her own.
English Language Arts
READING
This month, second graders are beginning to study characters and their stories! Students will be taught skills and strategies for “reading” characters to help grow ideas about them. As students work inside early chapter books, you will also support them in accumulating the story, linking chapters, and dealing with any difficulty they encounter (just as we have done in past units of study).
Students will be encouraged to think of how they can be thoughtful fiction reader who think carefully about characters and their stories, asking and answering questions, drawing on strategies when books are hard to understand, and considering what an author intends for them to learn through a character’s journey.
Helpful Tips: Focus on studying characters before, during, and after reading a fiction book.
At home, you can ask: What are the things you can do before, during, and after reading a book to be a thoughtful reader of characters and stories?
WRITING
In writing, we are wrapping up our informational writing pieces. In this last part, we are focusing on “Writing for an Audience”.
As students write, they should ask themselves “What information does my audience want to know?" They will write descriptions and comparisons that will ultimately help their audience picture the information they are teaching.
Helpful Tip: Read some nonfiction books with your child. Encourage them to notice how an author hooks a reader right from the beginning of the book. Encourage your child to do this with their writing at home!
Math
In this unit, students will be introduced to The Sticker Station: a store that sells stickers in singles or strips of 10 (see picture below). This concept helps us teach about place value. By the
end of this month, we hope that students will be able to
- use a place value model to represent a 2 digit number as tens and ones
- use an equation to represent a 2-digit number as a sum of multiples of ten and some number of ones. (ex: 22=20+2 or 22=10+10+2)
- explore different combinations of tens and ones (ex: 4 tens and 6 ones is the same as 3 tens and 14 ones, etc.)
Helpful Tip: Test your child’s knowledge on place value at home. Have your child use sticker station to add 2 digit numbers together.
ART
Second graders will be exploring the art forms of ancient China. This year is the Year of the Dragon. Students will be making artwork related to the Lunar New Year and our school celebration.
MUSIC
In "Jazzuary," 2nd graders will listen to some jazz and will know what instruments are used in jazz. We will explore the idea of pitch by playing high and low pitches on our new xylophones, and we will learn how to read
notes and rhythms, and play some fun and easy note patterns on the xylophone as well. We will also explore pitch by learning the solfege singing system, and will learn about the idea of tempo, or the speed of music.
Upcoming Events
1/2
BACK FROM WINTER RECESS
1/5
SCHOOL PICTURE RETAKE !
1/15
Martin Luther King, Jr. Day: NO SCHOOL
1/24
WACKY WEDNESDAY
1/26
FAMILY DEAR TIME
2/19-2/23
WINTER BREAK
**SECOND GRADE CREATIVE STAGES ARTS RESIDENCY CONTINUES!
Social Studies
In second grade, we continue our study of NYC over time. We are continuing our work learning about the early settlers, the use of natural resources and what life was like during the early development of New York City.
GYM
This month, we will begin our soccer unit. We will work on skills such as dribbling, passing, shooting, and some defense. We will practice these skills in a variety of group games.
Science
Second graders have finished the first unit of study and have taken the end of unit assessment. We will begin the next unit of study called Properties and Patterns of Water.
In this unit, we will talk about the properties of water and other materials. Students will learn that water can be found on earth and it exists in solid, liquid, and gas form.