Our First Marble Jar Celebration

Celebrating doing our BEST!

Our class earns marbles when we are doing our best and helping others.  What a wonderful group we have in second grade... our marble jar was filled in no time!  So, we brainstormed ideas and voted on a fun way to celebrate.  This first marble jar celebration was a big hit!  We made spooky haunted gingerbread houses.  The kids loved it!  Thank you to families for all the yummy donations.

Genius Hour:  At the end of each week, the entire second grade gets together for Genius hour.  Activities for Genius hour will vary throughout the year.  The first week, we opened our connecting classroom doors and let the children explore and play in both classrooms.  For the second Genius hour, Rockin' Ron the Friendly Pirate visited. This week, we worked on expanding our thinking with a challenging engineering task.  The children had to design a stand for an award winning apple using only straws and tape.  So far our Genius hour is off to a great start.  It is an exciting way to end our week of learning.

Reading: In Reading, we have begun learning about narratives.  We have read many narrative texts and looked for the major components of this type of story.  We are now exploring further: characters, setting, beginning, middle, end, problem and solution.  We are also using the reading block to practice sight words.  (Sight words are words that you know automatically by "sight" and do not need to sound out.)  Second graders are responsible for learning to read and spell 200 sight words throughout the year.  So this week, we worked on the first ten words.  We practiced in many fun ways.

Spelling:  We are using a program called Fundations this year to help us with our spelling or word work each day.  So far, we have reviewed the digraphs: ch, sh,wh, th, and ck. We have also worked on consonant blends (spl, scr, fr are examples of blends- two or more consonants whose sounds are blended together.)

Here is a funny little video the children enjoyed about digraphs:

Writing:  We have begun exploring the writing process.  So far we explicitly taught how to  plan and create a rough draft of a narrative.  We have discussed the elements of the beginning, middle, and end.  The stories we have written so far are great.  It is fun to see the students begin to expand on their writing and use author's craft.  I now see children add bold words, dialogue, and their favorite is the ellipses.... we never know what might happen next.

Mathematics: We are just about to finish unit one of Bridges.  In this unit, we practiced our facts to twenty using number racks, bead strings, and number lines.  We ended this week with a look at story problems and learned how to show our work or mathematical thinking.  In unit one, we also worked on time to the hour and the concept of even and odd.  We are using reflex math in our classroom to practice the automaticity of math facts.  Please encourage your child to practice reflex at home as well.

Candy Corn Math facts

Habits of Mind:  We have been working on two habits of mind so far this year: managing our impulsivity and perseverance.  We have read many books and watched several short video clips to help with class discussion about these habits.  The children's favorite video is The Persistent Pig!   He NEVER gives up...

Typing: We have began learning keyboarding skills.  Soon we will use the program typing.com to practice each week.

Adding the Arts: After we said "Good-bye" to our butterflies, we decided to paint butterflies for our hallway.  They are beautiful.

Dates to Remember:
Wednesday, Oct. 3- Picture Day, Nutrition Lesson with Nurse Reed

Thursday, Oct. 4- Guest Teacher all day

Wednesday, Oct. 10- Nutrition Lesson with Nurse Reed

Friday, Oct. 12- Fire Prevention Assembly, Friendly Pirate Visit

Monday, Oct. 15- Evacuation Drill 10:00

Tuesday, Oct. 16- Open House, 6-7pm

Wednesday, Oct. 17- Nutrition Lesson with Nurse Reed

Oct. 18 & 19- No School, Professional Development

Thursday, Oct. 25- Early Release 11:30, No lunch served

Friday, Oct. 26- COL, 8:10

Welcome to our Classroom Blog

Welcome Families!

I created this blog to keep you up to date on all the fun happenings in our classroom!  The year is off to a GREAT start.  Your children are a joy to work with: everyone is settling in, developing nice friendships, and learning our daily routines.  

This blog will give you a sneak peek into all that we are learning.  I have automatically signed you up for the blog using the email address that you have provided the school.  If you do not wish to receive these updates for any reason you can unsubscribe at the bottom of the screen.  I hope you enjoy! 

Our First Thursday Celebration Day

Classroom Routines:
The beginning of the year is all about developing classroom routines, expectations, and independence within the classroom.  We spent the first week learning all about our second grade day and getting to know one another!

Then, our class began developing our Hopes and Dreams for the beginning of the year.  The children reflected on what parts of the school day they would like to get better at.  They picked one to two goals for their learning.  Here we are diving into second grade with our goals:

These are our goals for the first half of the year!

We also developed our classroom rules.  Each child wrote their ideas on sticky notes and we sorted the ideas into groups.

Together we came up with the following rules:
1. Be Safe
2. Be Kind to Everyone
3. Be Appropriate
4. Do your best Everyday

Growth Mindset:

We began the year, discussing how mistakes help us learn.  We have been learning more about the idea of growth mindset and how to make your brain "stronger."  We watched a series of short videos where the character learns about how his brain works and about how challenges are good for his brain.

Reading Workshop:
We began our year by working on our reading stamina.  How long we could quietly read to ourselves without getting distracted.  We worked on this for several days and now... we can read silently for TWENTY minutes.

The children were delighted to open our classroom library.  We learned about how to care for and pick books that are "just right" for our reading level.  We also worked on how to appropriately read with a partner.

This week we began learning about reading strategies.  What to do when you come to an unknown word.  So far we have practiced: looking at the pictures for clues, and using the beginning sound to help decode.

Writing Workshop:
In writing, we began by declaring that we are all storytellers.  Each child has had a turn sharing a personal experience.  We are using these stories to help us come up with ideas of what we can write about this year.  We are also practicing our writing stamina.  The children are having fun experimenting with writing songs, jokes,stories, comics, and chapter books.

Mathematics:

We began the year by reviewing how to appropriately use our math manipulatives.  We then learned how to do math workplace time: this is a time daily where students practice math skills with a partner through math games.  We learned many fun new games like:  Make the sum, Watch out addition, Rock around the clock and many more.

We have now begun unit one in Bridges Mathematics.  In this unit, children learn to use a number rack to work with facts within 20 with missing addends. They also learn about story problems, even and odd numbers, and time.

We have also begun using the online program- reflex math.  The children will use this program to practice automaticity of math facts.

Science:

We have begun the year exploring our hermit crabs and our monarch caterpillars.  The students have enjoyed learning facts about these animals, how to care for them, and their lifecycle.  Today we let our first Monarch go!

A maze for our hermit crabs

A Butterfly Spelling Craft