Welcome to St. Mary of The Lake School's Second Grade Class!  Thank you for visiting.

Getting back into a routine is fun and exciting.  In second grade we have been learning about the Constitution and why it is an important part of United States History.  Community, Geography, and Citizenship are the beginning unit of study this year in Social Studies.

We are working hard on cursive this month.  The decline of cursive is happening as students are doing more and more work on computers, including writing. In 2011, the writing test of the National Assessment of Educational Progress will require 8th and 11th graders to compose on computers, with 4th graders following in 2019. Text messaging, e-mail, and word processing have replaced handwriting outside the classroom. Cursive writing is a lifelong skill, one that could become lost to the culture, making many historic records hard to decipher and robbing people of "a gift." Practice at home!

Visit our new favorite links on the left.

Homework not available.

Spring Break
	No school on Good Friday, 4/2/10.  Spring Break is April 5-9, 2010.  School Resumes on Monday, 4/12/10.

Leaning Addition and Subtraction Regrouping this Month

It can be difficult for children to understand the abstract concept of regrouping, so many lessons on addition with regrouping use manipulatives to teach it in a concrete way. Manipulatives are any physical objects that students can use to represent addition. You can also use everyday objects, like dried beans or pasta as manipulatives. Draw two columns on a large sheet of construction paper. Label the left column '10s' and the right column '1s.' Set up your manipulatives by placing 10 dried beans into mini paper cups. Each paper cup represents 10. Set up your math problem on the construction paper. If you want to represent 22, use two cups and two beans. If you want to represent 19, use one cup and nine beans. Children can solve the problem by counting 10 beans from the '1s' column and placing them in a cup. Those beans go into the '10s' column. Now there are four cups and one bean, so the answer is 41.

First Communion
	The second grade students are preparing to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation on May 2, 2010.