Language Arts

Since winter break, the past couple months have been filled with seasonal holidays and events. We also finished  Stuart Little, and have since moved on to the  Peter Rabbit series.

The second graders focused on high frequency words, and final word endings (silent e words and verbs ending in -ing) in the familiar song Winter Garden, and more recently, the poem Love Is.

The children spent January learning about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr and Ruby Bridges. They read about them, and discussed and wrote about their dreams and goals for showing kindness.

The children have been working on parts of speech. Using our songs, poems, and creating silly sentences, they grasped nouns and worked on verbs. 

To kick off our verb work, they brainstormed actions and we played a charades-like game. This was very popular! We noted and used the -ing spelling pattern and rules.

To deepen our understanding of verbs, we worked on our superpower projects. The children drew and labeled their “strengths”, wrote a paragraph about it, and created a shield to represent their superpower. Come see them all together in the rug room! They’ll go home shortly.

We have been learning about Ohlone culture. We went on a field trip to the Santa Cruz Natural History Museum to learn more about our local native people. At school, we told and read various traditional tales, and wrote stories inspired by these tales. We are currently focused on the role of language to a culture, specifically through music. We are creating clapper sticks in the same fashion as the Ohlone: out of “the tree of music”-an elderberry tree. 

For Valentine’s week, we wrote poetry. We focused specifically on free verse and acrostic poetry. I hope you read and enjoyed the various poetry projects your child took home afterwards. 

On Valentine’s Day, the students performed the Love Is poem they had learned and choreographed in the week’s leading up to this exciting holiday.