Welcome to second grade, my name is Mr. Deabenderfer. It is going to be an exciting year.  This Open House letter is a very quick over view of the classroom and school year. In Language Art, we are going to learn about Narrative, Informational, Persuasive, Response to Literature and Poetry genres this year.  In math, we will learn about place value, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, measurement, time to five minutes, geometry, money, and fractions. Word problems will become a much bigger portion of our learning and we will be doing many Exemplar problems. Number Talks will deal with mental math process. In science, we will learn about patterns in the sky, changes to Earth, matter, energy, motion and life cycles. In social studies, we will learn about government, Georgia’s past settlers, Creek Native Americans, changes in Georgia, landforms, maps, and biographies. These are just some of the things that you will learn about this year. We will also continue to use the RACE Method to answer word problems in all subjects..

To help with organization, students will need a 3 ring binder to keep papers and playlists. This will go back and forth from home and school daily. There will be a section for the nightly homework for you to complete nightly. There is also a place for you to sign so that I know you have seen the agenda and the stamp for good behavior or a note explaining their behavior for the day.

 I will teach the students how to do their homework before it is assigned to them. I will send home a weekly newsletter on Fridays that will give the specifics of that week and the spelling words. I will do my best to update the web site as much as possible. Something that you will notice about this classroom is that everything is small group instruction after a lesson. I group skills in all subjects based on needs and mistakes that the students are making. Students will be placed into many groups over the course of the school year and will have great growth because of it.

Normally in the class newsletter, there is the section on Homework and what it will be each night. I have not made the final decision yet on how much will be assigned each night. Once I make that decision the students will learn the proper way to complete each assignment and put into the binder as an example. This will come home that first week. I have a few options and am weighing which will be the most beneficial to students. We will have weekly newsletters sent home. I am going to keep the webpage up to date as well.

Spelling tests are given on Thursday’s and graded at the time of the test so that students can bring them home. I am the pilot classroom for personalized leaning which means that many people will be visiting our classroom during the school year. Personalized learning is a fancy way of saying that students are being taught on their personal levels to help improve their learning and instruction. I will be using playlists to keep students on track for each of the units that we study.

• Learn to Type

   

  Learn to type with animals from the UK!

   

  http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/typing/