I hope all of our second grade families are settling into a rhythm this past week. We just finished up a two-week block based on the Jataka tales which are based off the Buddha's previous incarnations. Our home lessons have consisted of listening to a tale, sleeping on it, and the next day retelling the tale, drawing and writing about it. Woven into each story has been the use of quotation marks in various ways. During class, we had been learning how to use these "speaking marks" ("bunny ears") around words that are truly spoken by someone. For math, there have been various activities to choose from to support developing addition and subtraction skills. These have included a variety of card games to play and worksheets. We also started a new class read-aloud titled, The Wind Boy. It is a sweet story of two children who had to leave their homeland and their desire to make friends in their new village. I hope it will lighten our students' days and fill their minds with beautiful images of friendships to hold them over until we can be together again.
This week we will move into a block of Native American Tales. These tales weave many lessons through stories of nature and magic. While listening to them, we have the option to use our copy work to focus on the present and past tenses of verbs (we will not say that directly to the children as terminology will come later and they will realize they have known it all along! :). Through writing a list of things they like to do, the children can then act them out (present tense) and lastly talk about having done them (past tense). Parents may choose to help guide this exercise by helping their child to rewrite their lists using "ing" for present tense and "ed" for past tense (and learn a few spelling rules for each along the way). There is also the opportunity to practice math facts by playing new games (dice this week!) and do a few more worksheets. We will also continue our read aloud of The Wind Boy.
While I am missing each child and their families, I believe this time holds some good in it for each of us. My hope is you may all find it and cherish it. May you smile often and find joy together during these lovely spring days!
With gratitude,
Melissa