A Few Reminders! 3/10/17

Hi Dragonfly Families!

I wanted to send out a few reminders before I bombard you with our learning happenings of 2D in the near future. If you are interested in taking an after school activity please send in your forms Monday morning. The after school activities begin NEXT week! Variety show forms are due Monday morning as well. If you have taken Twist & Sprout in a previous session or are taking it this session, starting Monday- and you would like your child to participate in the upcoming Variety Show with the Twist & Sprout Crew, please send in the form by Monday morning!

Next week we have an Early Release on Thursday. Students will be released at 12:50. There is no school on Friday, March 17th due to a teacher inservice day. 

Thank you to everyone for sending in the fairytale preference sheet for the 2nd Grade Wax Museum! We are off to a great start and have already started creating some of our murals. In order for your dragonfly to begin working on their mural, they must have a plan for what they are wearing the day of the wax museum. Students are eager to begin this process so please start having a conversation at home about what their wax museum costume will be. Please remember, costumes can be put together at home (no purchasing necessary!) This is an exciting event in our classroom and we can't wait to share our learning with you. 

Thank you and Happy Friday!

Newsletter 2/10/17

Happy Valentine's Day and what a wacky few weeks! 

I hope you enjoyed your three snow days and delayed openings! What a whirlwind of a week! We were still able to tackle our learning and share special times together! 

Reading

We celebrated our character unit with our soiree and the students loved acting like their character. The students interacted with other characters and had some snacks during it! We are now working on strengthening our reading strategies in our new unit! Get ready to watch your reader blossom in their fluency and expression!

Writing

We ended our fictional writing unit and are now working on our celebration piece. We are creating a class book, titled "The Day 2D's Crayons Came to Life!" The students are each writing a letter from their crayon, just like in the book we all know and love, "The Day the Crayons Quit". We will wrap this up next week and display it in the hallway. The students will be moving into a lab report writing unit. 

Science

We continue to do our science experiment rotations, every Wednesday. So far, the students have experimented with air in Miss Riley's room and with creating protective hats in Mrs. Healey's room. We continue to work on our understanding of matter and our understanding of the different parts of experiments and lab reports. 

Math

We will test for unit 5 on Tuesday. We are learned so much this unit and took time to review tricky concepts. We focused on coin puzzles and now using our strategies for subtraction and addition to help us! We continue to review money. Next week, we will venture into graphing and geometry!

February Focus

During the month of February there is SO much going on! We celebrated Day 100, and had so much fun learning on this day! We even saw what we would look like if we were 100 years old. Today we launched our investigation on George Washington in honor of Presidents Day coming up. We will be learning about presidents in history! The week of February 20th is Read Across America, stay tuned for the week's events!

Don't forget: Wednesday February, 15th is an early release day! Students will be released at 12:50.

Character Soiree

Hello 2D families! 

Tomorrow morning, February 3rd-- during Reader's Workshop we are having a "Character Soiree" where we will be enjoying some snacks and taking all of the information we have learned from our character study unit to act like our characters. During the party we will be in full character with our actions and words! Students are encouraged to dress like their character- but with only things from home (no need to go out and buy anything!) We are so excited for tomorrow and to end our character study unit with a fun celebration! 

Valentine's Day Celebration

Happy Monday! 

It was so nice to be back on this chilly Monday. Information about our Valentine's Day celebration was sent home today in your child's blue folder. I am also posting it here so you can easily access it, as it approaches. This is just a small event for the class and we only need a few snacks. If you are interested in donating a snack, please email me, otherwise I will provide something small for the students! A class list was sent home today but as always, please email me if you have any questions about the event!

Our class will be having a small Valentine’s Celebration at 1:30 on Tuesday, February 14th.

Students are encouraged to exchange valentines with their peers. Homemade ones are best! Please be mindful of our school policy for bringing in snacks (store bought and approved by nurse Lilly) and remind your child that if they are bringing in valentines, they must bring one for every member of our class.

      We have a class of 18!

If you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

 Thanks & Happy Valentine’s Day!

        

Newsletter 1/27/17

Hello 2D Families! 

It has been a wonderful two weeks of learning in our classroom. We went back to basics and chose new reading spots for Reader's Workshop and talked a lot about kindness and personal body space. The students were such hard workers for the last two weeks and I'm always so proud! Here are some highlights from our learning fun!

Reading

We've been social detectives and analyzing relationships between characters and what they tell us. The coolest part of this work has been seeing them recognize qualities of growth mindset in their characters. We had visitors during reading from all over our school district and they were blown away by the students' growth  mindset vocabulary. We have been doing a lot of talking around our "read aloud character" Clementine and have found that she is very empathetic and we are now able to back up that statement with evidence. 

Writing

We are cruising along with our fictional stories and the students are excited to add illustrations and title pages. We have taken the time to edit and add in detail and our own craft. The students are truly able to read their own writing and begin the editing process on their own. It is so exciting. The students love sharing their writing. 

Math

This week we worked on diagrams to help us with our addition and subtraction word problem strategies. We did subtraction and addition with "start,change,end" and "part, part, total" boxes. We also learned how to jump on a numberline by 100s, 20s, 10s, 5s and 1s to help us solve word problems. Please work with your students using coins at home, this will keep it fresh in their minds until we get back to money! 

Science

 We have begun experimenting and our main question was: Can a solid change shape? Many students said "NO!" They were especially amazed to realize that solids CAN change shape. How did we discover this? We used something as simple as a starburst! The students each held an unwrapped starburst in their hands and then after five minutes started combining them with the person next to them. We ended up with one big starburst ball. The students were so blown away that solids can change shape, and some- like a starburst, so easily. So then it came to our big discovery! We had to ask ourselves how exactly did the starburst change shape? The students decided it was through our force and our body temperature. We began talking about the different parts of a science experiment and recorded each one to prepare for our new lab report unit that is coming up soon! The students recorded their essential question, hypothesis, materials, procedure, results and conclusion. Prior to this experiment we played with Oobleck and the students had to decide if it was a solid or a liquid and have evidence for why!

Questions to ask you Dragonfly for school/home talk:

What is your favorite word sort choice?

Where is your new reading spot?

What was your hypothesis for the starburst experiment?

Which math diagram do you prefer? "Part, Part, Total" or "Start, Change, End"?

What is the first thing you should do when you look at a math word problem?