Where We Are in Place and Time: Migration

The past 6 weeks flew by! Students wrapped up their work for the “How the World Works:

Weather” Unit. Please visit the class blog to see the great videos they wrote AND edited.

We wrote and published weather memory stories, and learned about patterns. This week

we began our new unit of inquiry...

Transdisciplinary Theme: Where We are in Place and Time: Migration

Central Idea: When people migrate, they adapt to a changing world.

Learner profile attributes: Open-minded, Balanced

Concepts: Connection and Perspective

Lines of Inquiry:

How to maintain one’s original culture while adapting to a new one

Our roles and responsibilities as hosts and migrants

Why people migrate and the effects of migration

Students will be conducting surveys of the elementary school to find out how many of the

students have migrated and graph and map their information. They will also be inter-

viewing parents who come from different countries to see how they have adapted to Ecuador

and what they have maintained from their culture and present their findings to another

second grade class.

We are currently finishing up our unit about story problems. Our next unit will be

“Addition, Subtraction, and Probability.” This unit is meant to solidify students’

knowledge of basic facts and help them solve ones that they do not know with more ease.

They will be looking at patterns and relationships between basic addition and subtraction

facts such as fact families and doubles. Students will also be introduced to probability

through work place activities. Through supplemental material and IXL we will be practic-

ing comparing and ordering numbers up to 100 as well.

We will continue focusing on making connections and retelling throughout the begin-

ning of this unit. We have discussed making connections to our own lives (text-to-self)

and to other books we have read (text-to-text). During Reading Workshop, students will

begin exploring connections from their stories to the world around them (text-to-world).

We will also begin the strategies of creating mental images.

During our Unit of inquiry, we will be reading various stories of migration and focusing

on reasons the characters migrated, how they adapted to their new culture and what they

maintained from their homes. The major writing project for this unit will involve the stu-

dents taking the perspective of a migrant from the past, imagining their experiences and

writing a narrative in the first-person describing their migration to a new country. They

will share these stories with you at the end of the unit.

For word study, students will continue with long vowel patterns as well as strategies for

word solving in their reading. We will also begin collecting interesting words from our

reading to build our vocabulary.

Other news: Halloween will be celebrated from 2-3 on October 28th. Students should

bring their costumes to school in a bag. They will change at lunch and should do so inde-

pendently so parents do not need to come in to help them change. Thank you!

Please check msnataliesclassgrade2.blogspot.com for periodic updates, homework, pic-

tures, and student projects. Thanks!