Week 3

Dear Parents,

        The third week of school flew by! Your children are already getting settled into their routines and are leading their own learning ! It is so wonderful to see such kind and caring students step up to help one another! In math this week we covered many skills. We learned all about pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters. We learned their value and described how they looked. We played a fun game called collect 25 cents to reinforce our counting and trading of pennies for coins of larger amounts. We were also practicing our mental math with number talks. We are seeing how doubles and near doubles can help us find answers to number sentences. We played plus 1 or 2 bingo to help our counting up 1 or 2 from a number. Learning was fun for all!

         In writing we continued working on the first 25 days of writer’s workshop. We looked at three mentor texts to see how writer’s write. We learned how illustrations can sometimes show important information about a story that is not in the written text. The children are patterning a story like Mo Willems. They are trying things like speech bubbles, words written in different sizes to show emotion, using a photo as part of an illustration and playing around with different layouts of pictures and words. I love the creativity happening in my class!

          This was our first week of word study  to include our words their way spelling lists. We practiced how to sort and are learning ways we can practice our words! 

            In reading we have been practicing our station choices so that when we begin guided reading they know what is expected of them at each station. Next week we will take our first istation test. Some children will be tested with a DRA timed reading (1 on 1 with me if I need more information about a student.) Once this testing is complete, guided reading will begin.  Small, leveled books will be coming home for students to read the night that their guided reading group meets and be brought back the following day.

            In science we finished up our unit about scientists and their tools and began our second unit on classifying matter. We had an investigation where we observed matter in different states and wrote down our observations.

             In social studies we are discussing the characteristics of good citizens. We read a scholastic news together and talked about our rights and responsibilities as second graders. We wrote our class mission statement together on Monday. I allowed any student who wanted to create our class mission poster to do so. Six students rose to the task. We voted on which one would be made into a poster to be hung above our doorway. Congratulations to Analise. Her Mission Statement Poster was chosen to represent our class.  

If you could respond to this e-mail with just your child’s name and whether his/her picture can be posted on our blog, I can start taking pictures of the children. Example: John, yes you may post his picture on the blog. I still need to hear from nine parents whether I can post pictures. If you would rather I not, please let me know that as well.

Have a nice long, relaxing weekend with your families!