Lots of learning has been happening the past few weeks! Here is an overview of what we have been working on, and what we are going to be starting soon:

Reading- We finished up our unit on summarizing, and now we are moving onto making predictions and inferencing when reading.

Writing- We took a quick break with opinion writing to write about an Everyday Hero who has impacted our life. Next week, students will work on a narrative writing piece for our school's writing fair. There will be one overall grade level winner for this competition. We will also learn how we can use adjectives and adverbs to make our writing more interesting.

Math-Students have been doing really well with adding 3 and 4 numbers together with the partial sums strategy-see pic below:

Now we are moving onto using this strategy with adding 3 digit numbers,  which looks like this:

Science/Social Studies- We finished up Martin Luther King Jr. this week. I have been really impressed with the students knowledge about him. Their projects and presentations were awesome and I can tell they learned a lot from it.

In science lab, we went on another seasonal walk, this time looking for signs of winter.

Next week, we will begin our space unit. We are starting with how the sun's position changes during the day, how it creates shadows, and how it relates to the change of day and night in seasons (ex- Days are longer than the night in the summer). Students will be taking home a moon calendar on Monday. Starting February 1st, they will start recording the phase of the moon that they see outside for that day. They will do this for the entire month of February. Additional information will be on the calendar to help with this assignment, but feel free to contact me if you have any additional questions about it.

Here are some other important details about events going on:

**Tuesday, February 7th, class and spring pictures

**Wednesday, February 8th, field trip to the Cobb Energy Centre for a ballet performance of the fairy tale Sleeping Beauty

**Six Flags reading logs are due February 15th

**Please join us for an Addison experience of math in the real world! Students who participate get a special prize at the end for turning in their scavenger hunt!

Publix Math Night

Thursday, February 16^th

5:00 to 7:00 p.m.

3605 Sandy Plains Rd.

Marietta, GA  30066

**Here is a note from the Foundation about some events happening this Spring:

Parents,

The Spring semester is here and that means lots of fun events from Addison Foundation to keep your kids happy and the Science Lab going!

The next teacher auction items are coming!  Bidding is now open -  Monday, February 6th from 2:30 - 4 is the After School Art Class with Miss Stoddard!  And taking place on Friday, February 10th from 6-8pm, a Girls' Night Out Shenanigans After School with Mrs. Hallmark!!  Check out the experiences and get more information at www.biddingowl.com/addisonelementary.  If any questions, reach out to Laura Glancy, President at lauragpta@gmail.com

As always, details can be found on the Foundation website at www.foundation4addison.org.  Thank you for supporting our Foundation's work to give us the Science Lab and other wonderful things!

**Here is another reminder about the Parent Climate Survey:

Georgia Parent Survey

Please note that the school climate surveys for the 2016-2017 school year are officially open, and will remain open through Friday, March 3, 2017. It is critical for all schools to get parents to participate in the surveys.

The Georgia Parent Survey is also modeled after the student survey questions. Parents may complete the survey using their personal computer, smartphones or tablet.  For parents that do not have access to the Internet, school administrators should consider scheduling dates and times to allow parents to complete the Georgia Parent Survey at school.  All parents should be encouraged to participate in the Georgia Parent Survey because the data will be used as part of the calculation of the School Climate Star Rating. Survey responses are anonymous and will be submitted directly to the Georgia Department of Education for analysis.  Individual data results from the Georgia Parent Survey will not be available to the public and will not be posted online.  The URL address for the Georgia Parent Survey is posted below.

http://apps.gadoe.org/schoolclimate/parents.nsf/Survey.xsp

I hope everyone had a wonderful, restful, and relaxing break! I know I certainly enjoyed my time off but am ready to get back to school to start the 2nd half of 2nd grade!

Take a look at some of the exciting events that happened before our break:

Mary Musgrove visited our Media Center and shared about her life in Savannah.

Students enjoyed another exciting Science Lab lesson on forces and motion:

Creating holiday glyph pictures with our 4th grade buddies!

Our gingerbread holiday party! Big thanks to the volunteers for getting everything ready, especially the McQuilken family for all the "behind the scenes" work that they did! Everyone had a wonderful time!

As far as what is coming up the next few weeks....

In math, we will be starting a new addition strategy called partial sums. I will post an example of this strategy on the blog soon. 

In reading, we will be working on monitoring when reading, as well as summarizing the stories we are reading. 

For writing/language arts, we are starting our opinion writing unit where students will write their opinions about books that they are reading. We will start with writing letters about our opinions, which will tie into our next grammar skill- using commas in openings and closings of letters. 

In Social studies, we will be learning about Martin Luther King Jr. Students will be given a MLK Jr.   project on Monday, Jan. 9th so look for that to come home soon. This project will replace reading fluency and math homework next week, but students will still have spelling and reading log homework (reading about MLK Jr. counts towards the reading log!). 

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns about anything. I look forward to a great start to the 2nd half of our year!

It is hard to believe the end of the 2nd quarter is upon us. We have been working hard and are all ready for our Holiday party and winter break!

The next week and a half will be filled with some fun holiday activities, including reading lots of gingerbread stories as well as some dress up days that students can participate in. The calendar with the dress up days went home on Thursday. Information about the class holiday party went home on Thursday as well. It is nice to see that so many people have already signed up to donate or bring in items! The 3 volunteer spots to help set up for the party filled up quickly, but if you are interested in coming to volunteer during the party, then please let Brooke McQuilken (newstreambl@gmail.com)  or I know and we can plan accordingly. The party will run approximately from 1:10-2:10. If you do plan to come to the party, please make sure no siblings attend. Below is a link for the Holiday party sign up if you need it:

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20f094fa9ae2aa1fe3-hanson

Thank you in advance for your support in making sure our party is a success! Please make sure all donations are turned in by this Friday!

To finish out the quarter, students will pick a historical figure they have learned about the past few weeks and will write an informational paper on them. They will choose from Mary Musgrove, Tomochichi, or James Oglethorpe.

We have been working on 2 step word problems and will make a holiday word problem book this week to practice solving the problems with different math strategies we have learned this year. Students have been measuring items in centimeters, meters, inches, and feet, and this week we will work more on comparing their measurements, as well as putting their measurements on a line plot.

This week in the science lab, students reviewed heat energy by making pancakes and saw how a liquid can be changed into a solid when you add heat energy. It was a yummy experiment that was enjoyed by all! Students also participated in other heat and sound energy experiments to see how it made matter change.

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving! It was great seeing many of you at the Thanksgiving lunch, the students are always so excited to have special guests join them for lunch.

The next few weeks we have a lot going on! Students have been doing great with the new math strategies they have learned this quarter, and they will continue to learn a few more, including using a hundreds chart to add and subtract. We will also be working on 2 step word problems, estimating and measuring objects with centimeters, meters, and then inches and feet.

Students finished up their energy unit last week, and even wrote a book about the different kinds of energy we studied- light, heat, and motion. Students enjoyed a fun STEM lesson in our science lab. They worked with a partner to come up with a way to help their race car move with only a few materials. It was interesting to see all the different ideas!

The rest of the quarter we will be studying Georgia's Beginnings in social studies. They will learn about the historical figures James Oglethorpe, Tomochichi, and Mary Musgrove.

In reading and language arts, we will work on inferencing, reflexive pronouns, root words with prefixes and suffixes, and informational writing.

Reminders:
Reading Logs will be checked for the month of November on December 1st. In order for students to receive credit for reading this month, there must be a parent initial and the number of minutes read for 4-5 days a week. The students have a goal of reading 20 minutes 5 times a week (100 minutes a week).
Any donations (money/gift cards) for the Holiday Shoppe Gift Basket should be turned in by December 5th. Please refer to the email that Mrs. McQuilken sent last week if you have any questions.
Info about our class Holiday Party will be coming soon  :)