Language Arts

The second graders are pleased to announce they have pen pals! My sister Sofi, who has visited Orchard School over the years, and I have teamed up to make this happen. She is a school social worker near Chicago, and we will be sending letters back and forth from our students.

To familiarize our second graders with Chicago, we practiced beginning map skills and vocabulary. After exploring our own maps of the United States, we first found California. Next, San Francisco and noted how close we are to San Francisco, yet too small for a dot of our own. We applied this skill to finding Illinois, then Chicago, and we noted how Morton Grove is close to Chicago, but like us, too small to be found on the map.  

At home, consider looking up Chicago, or Morton Grove. Or perhaps look up your hometown! 

In addition to map hunting, we also have been generating questions to ask our pen pals, and drawing pictures of what we like to do at Orchard School to send to our pen pals   (Unicycling seems the constant favorite).

Finally, we have been reviewing last year's High Frequency Words with games, abc order, reading and writing.