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!
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| Our First Thursday Celebration Day |
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:
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| 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!
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| A maze for our hermit crabs |
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| A Butterfly Spelling Craft |
