Newsletter!

Hello Families!

I hope your weekend didn't fly by as fast as our week did in our classroom! We got a lot accomplished and it felt like it just disappeared! The Dragonflies are becoming very impressive readers and writers. We have stepped up our questioning in science and did a lot of crafts this week relating to Johnny Appleseed, word problems, and the Growth Mindset approach. These kind kids also held down the fort while I went to a conference to learn some amazing new strategies for independent learning styles. 

A Heads Up!

This week, you will receive homework resources to kick off October. These resources are for your dragonfly to use at your family's convenience. You will have user names and passwords for various resources so make sure to keep these in a safe place! Our weekly sight words will not start this week but will begin the first week we bring home our sort words too! I will send out reminders when our first sort words are sent home! I will also be sending out a Signup Genius link this week for you to pick your family/teacher conference times. Our conferences start in late October this year! I will post the link to the blog this week and I can't wait to find a time to meet about your child's progress!

Academics

I will keep our weekly update brief but it has been so exciting settling into our daily routines and becoming comfortable with the technology we have in our room! We began our iready assessments for math and are utilizing our chrome books and ipads for math currently! In math we are focusing on word problems and strategies for solving them. We will be completing our first performance task  this week and wrapping up iready assessments! Reading and Writing have been extra meaningful as we move through our curriculum but also begin working on independent goals that are self monitored and decided through conferring We are also assessing in reading, to find our current "just right" level for reading. We are getting to know ourselves as learners and gaining confidence in learning areas everyday. It makes me giddy just talking about it! 

Pictures from our learning are a little slim today! I got a new phone and am still transferring some over. There will be a photo overload next week! :)

Newsletter!

Greetings!

I hope everyone had a safe and restful weekend. We certainly had a busy week in the Dragonfly Class. So many friendships are blossoming and our kindness is through the roof! It's a great place to spend our days. Please note that this coming Wednesday is Johnny Appleseed Day for the second grade. Please have your child come to school with one apple for that day! Thursday of this week is an early release! 

Math

This week we talked a lot about how math facts can help us solve trickier math problems. We talked about how doubles facts can help us and how we can recognize doubles facts and subtract or add on to solve a problem, if needed. We talked a lot about using an open number line to help us solve problems! 

Reading

This week we learned some great reading strategies to solve tricky words. We had a great foundation from first grade and built upon that to collect even more reading strategies to use. After understanding the different types of reading strategies we then took on a more mature step in our reading. In an effort to get to know ourselves as readers- our strengths and where we are striving, we started to record which reading strategies we use the  most. From here, we see what strategies our brain likes to use most while we are reading. For some, we are more visual and look for clues in the pictures and for others we skip the word and see if we can figure out what would make sense in the sentence. We are going to use what we know about our reading brains to form our first personal goals in reading, this coming week!

Writing

This week we started writing small moments. We zoomed into a few minutes of a great memory we have and wrote about it in detail. This is no easy task for even adults! The students have taken on this challenge and have written some amazing small moments so far. We are starting them off with a catchy hook to interest our audience. 

Science

In STEM buddies this week we displayed our inventions and had a museum walk to add compliments or questions onto other student's creations. The students are doing such a great job exploring and building together during buddies. In our classroom, we have been exploring with magnets. We are gathering  information about how magnets work and what in our room is magnetic. We have many questions we would like to explore and some of them will take us out on the playground this coming week!