BIG IDEA: A community is a group of living and non-living things sharing a common purpose or space

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Honey Horn Plantation:  
​Native and Colonial Americans

Community Systems:  Then and Now
​Non-Fiction Books

Informational Writing
Lab Reports and How-To Essays

Daily Five--Reading and Word Work

Mathematicians at Work and Play

Community Systems
The concept of community appears in almost every aspect of the world.  It refers to neighborhoods and cities created by people. In this unit, we look at many human communities to identify differences and similarities.  We compare communities from thousands of years ago to those we know today.

Our BIG IDEA is that a community is a group of living and non-living things sharing a common purpose or space.

Our Enduring Understandings are: 
Community Systems change over time.
All people have the same basic needs.
Sometimes people move locations to meet basic needs.
The United States of America is a country made up of many cultures.

Our Essential Questions are:
1 What makes a community sustainable?
2 How do you meet your needs? 
3 What are some basic human rights?
4 Is freedom for all?
5 Who helps protect freedom?
6 Does where you live affect how you live?

One of our ongoing projects has been creating individual timeline pieces in the form of a “Community Systems” book.  Inside, we compare NOW and THEN and explore how communities change over time.  As a group, we create a visual timeline with watercolor paintings and written captions.  We also look at our “place in space” and create a group concentric visual that ranges from our Riverview Charter School community all of the way to Our Solar System.

Our field trip this unit was a visit to Honey Horn Plantation on Hilton Head Island to the Coastal Discovery Museum.  There, we learned how Native American “Indians” lived here before Europeans arrived hundreds of years ago.  We made pinch pots and used shells, acorns and feathers to decorate the clay.  We learned how colonial South Carolinians lived soon after arriving to America and made headache bags using local herbs and spices and played typical games of colonial children.  

In writing, we have focused on Informational Text.  As inspiration, we created catapults from plastic spoons and rulers.  Then, as scientists, we tested different balls to see which would travel the farthest after being thrown by the catapult.  We were tasked to write steps and procedures that were precise and detailed.

In guided reading, we are reading many non-fiction books.  This exposure as readers helps us as writers.  Indexes, glossaries and tables of contents are all features that we are becoming familiar with using.  We now should understand how diagrams and bold text help us as readers to understand topics more clearly.

In mathematics, place value has been on the scene.  In second grade, students should understand what the position of digits signifies in numbers.  In 783, 7 is worth 7 hundreds, 8 is worth 8 tens and 3 is worth 3 ones.  By using rods and units, we were able to see how much each number is visually.


Now, we have moved on to using place value knowledge to help us with our subtraction and addition work with and without regrouping.  This is by far the most challenging math work we do as second graders and the kids continue to persevere and have made lots of progress.

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Winter Holiday and Birthday Celebrations