Mrs. G.'s Chalk Talk

Important Dates

September 30th : DCC parent meeting 7:00 pm
October 1st: Picture Day
October 7th: Student Count Day
October 16th: Fun Run/ Students brought home letters about the event and how they can help. This event helps to fund many of the activities we do throughout the year.

Our Fun Run Assembly

Reminders:

NWEA Testing (Northwest Evaluation Association) : Students wil be taking both a reading and a math assessment on the computer next week. Our classroom will take these tests on Thursday and Friday.

Students are allowed two healthy snacks a day. No nut products please due to allergies.

Please remember to send me a note if there are changes in your child's dismissal.

In order to make our dismissal run more smoothly, as a school, we are asking that if you are coming to pick up your child from school at the end of the day, that you stay in your car and go through the parent pick up car line. There has been a lot of conjestion near the doors and sidewalks and cutting through the parent pick up car line, which can be dangerous.

Math

Last week we continued to work on routines and procedures in our Math Learning Shop. We are continuing to work on building stamina in order to complete our learning activities in each station.

We will continue to study Unit 1 this week. Some of the lessons we've studied so far are:

Finding numbers to complete number sequences
Fill in numbers on a number scroll
Counting by ones and skip counting by tens
Finding equivalent names for a number

This week we'll learn more about finding equivalent names for a number, identifying even and odd numbers, skip counting and looking for patterns based on place value, comparing 2 digit numbers and coin amounts.

At the end of the week, I'll send home a review sheet whcih will outline the skills we are working on. Our first test will not be given until the week of October 5th, if I feel students are ready to be assessed. I'll send an email to notify you. IXL skills that can be practiced, please use any of the A (counting and number patterns) or B (comparing and ordering) activities.

Math Learning Shop consists of Math to Self (review and practice of basic math skills), Math with Someone (usually a math game from our Everyday Math series or number scrolls), Math and Writing (students explain a math concept using words, pictures, or diagrams) and Teacher Time (students meet with the teacher to review, assess or learn a new skill).

Math Worksheets Website- Salamander Math

Reading

We continued to work on routines and procedures in Reading Learning Shop. This week we'll continue practicing our rotations, learning how to use the sites and apps on our computers and Ipads for our Listen to Reading Station, how to work independently at our Word Learning Station (ending blends), Read to Self and shop at our Book Shop, and work with the teacher at the Teacher Time Station. We'll learn about keeping reading logs and setting goals as a reader this week and building stamina as a reader.

Assessments: I have completed almost all of our back to school reading assessments. Whew! On Friday I had a testing marathon and finished 15 assessments, while your child visited another second grade classroom. This was a great way to ensure continued instruction, while I focused on the testing. I'll email you soon with results!

Writing

Special Author visit: Maria Dismondy visited our school and talked about bullies, while highlighting her book, "Spaghetti on a Hotdog Bun."

In writing, we've been working on how writers get ideas for their writing pieces. We created a heart map and drew pictures on that map to show the things that we love. Authors often write about things that are close to their hearts. We started making a circle map to focus on one small moment topic. We also began a piece on our favorite fall activity. Next week, we'll complete some of these projects, learn how to organize our thinking for a personal narrative and continue to complete putting together and organizing our writing binders.

Science and Social Studies

This week we continued to explore our worms! We used a thinking routine called "Think, Puzzle and Explore." We brainstormed what we thought we know about worms, we wondered and asked questions about worms (puzzle) and this week we'll explore more by learning how to research about worms in our Reading Learning Shop. During our afternoon Social Studies time, we'll begin to learn about families.

Special Project:

Please send me (electronically through my email) a picture of your family. I'm trying to create a slide show of our classroom families. If you have any family pictures that are in native dress, that would be great too, as I want to focus on our classroom diversity. I'm not telling the students, as I want to surprise them with a slide show of families, and hopefully they'll recognize themselves in it!

Homework

Hopefully, you've received your password sheet and tried to log on to some of them. I believe the Language Arts has been added to the IXL now, so all students should be registered for Math and Language Arts. Please remember that these sites are simply options for students to complete their homework. They are NOT mandatory. All that we expect is for students to practice math for 10-15 minutes a night and reading for 10-15 minutes a night. This includes reading to them if you are reading a chapter book or a bedtime book to them. So much can be learned from visualizing during a read aloud. If you choose to use these resources, that's great, but students may practice reading and math in any way that works best for you and your family.