Happy Holidays 2016

Happy Holidays 2016

December 16, 2016

Dear Families,

We had a fabulous week in school! Here are some highlights from our week.

Important dates:​

·  Thursday, December 22nd: Grade Level holiday celebrations 10:30-11:15

·  Friday, December 23rd: Last day with students before break (full day)

·  Monday, December 26th: Holiday Break Begins

·  Monday, January 9th: Students/Staff Return from Break ​

Next week the entire school will be participating in some fun community building activities! If your child would like to participate, please look at the following schedule for a list of needed items. 

Fun activities planned for next week:

Monday: Drop Everything and Read! Our principal will make a surprise announcement at some point during the day to tell everyone to stop whatever they are doing and READ! Your child can either pick out a book from our classroom library, or they may bring a fun book from home.

Tuesday: Gingerbread Day! We don't need anyone to bring anything for today but we will be doing some fun gingerbread activities.

Wednesday: Grinch Day! Please have your child wear green on this day. We will also be watching the movie, The Grinch. It is rated PG, so please let us know if you would rather your child not participate in this activity and we will have something else for them to do.

Thursday: Festive Holiday Dress! This can be anything that means "holidays" to you! The second grade teachers will be sporting  very fashionable, ugly...I mean adorable...holiday sweaters :) Our holiday party will be from 10:30-11:15am. During the afternoon, we will be participating in a Game Day. If your child would like to bring in a favorite game to play in the classroom (for the day), they may certainly bring one in. 

Friday: Polar Express/Pajama Day! We will have our holiday sing along at 9:30am in the gym, followed by a day full of fun Polar Express related activities! Don't forget to wear some cute PJs!

It is going to be a very fun and festive week

​This past week: 

Reading:

This week, we continued to work on Monitoring and Clarifying. We read several books where we could practice our monitoring and clarifying strategies.  We use our "Checking Cheetah" to help us to stop and think, question, slow down, reread, make a connection, and visualize. In other words, we are working on checking our comprehension! That's what reading is all about! Another reading skill we've been working on is Close Reading where we read an article and answer questions. The challenging part is to monitor and clarify in order to find evidence of our answers in the text! You'll see our close reading articles with lots of highlighting! That's how we prove our answers. 

Word Work: 

​This week we worked on reviewing some of the word patterns that we've been focusing on throughout our long vowel pattern study. 

Writing: Don't forget to Kid blog over the break! It's a great way to practice writing skills as well as keep everyone in touch with what you're up to! 

This week, we also worked on our realistic fiction pieces. We created characters, settings and problems. Writing realistic fiction is a huge undertaking! We will continue to work on these in January. Some of the skills we are working on are revising, editing and author's craft such as snapshots, show not tell, and dialogue. 

Math: This week we completed Unit 4. This unit focused on time to the nearest 5 minutes, place value and measuring using inches and centimeters. We will review in class on Monday and take our test on Tuesday.  The  “at home review” was sent home several weeks ago. IT IS DUE ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 19^TH.

Be sure to review this weekend! Home links, At home review and Everyday Math website are great ways to practice these skills!

IXL Skills to practice for unit 4:

·         Comparing and Ordering: B.2

·         Place Value: any of the M section.

·         Time: Q.1-Q.8

·         Measurement with inches and centimeters: S.2, S.8

Character Trait of the Month: GRATITUDE.  We sent home a gratitude journal which we would like your child to complete at home as homework this month. It is due December 23^rd, our last day before break. We take great pride in adding these character traits to your child's curriculum.  We feel it greatly helps your child to grow into a well-rounded, kind and caring human being.  Please continue to talk about these traits at home and we will do the same here at school! 

Winter Gear: Please be sure to label snow pants, boots, and coats with your child's name. We know this is hard to believe, but many children don't recognize their own clothing!  

Have a great weekend!

The Second Grade Teachers

Attachments area

December 12, 2016

Dear Families,

We had a great week in school! Here are some highlights from our week.

 

Important dates:​

·  Wednesday, December 14th: Holiday Shop @ 4:30 - 8:00 pm

·  Thursday, December 15th: Holiday Shop @ 4:30 - 8:00 pm

·  Thursday, December 22nd: Grade Level holiday celebrations 10:30-11:15

·  Friday, December 23rd: Last day with students before break (full day)

·  Monday, December 26th: Holiday Break Begins

·  Monday, January 9th: Students/Staff Return from Break ​

​

Reading:

This week, we worked on Monitoring and Clarifying. Sometimes we don’t always understand everything in a story. Monitoring & Clarifying helps us to remember to think about the text to make sure we are monitoring our thinking and clearing up anything that wasn't understood. We slow down the zoom, zoom, zoom to make sure we are understanding and thinking about our reading! We stop and think, reread, ask questions, make a connection, visualize, and use context clues to help us to comprehend our reading.

 

Word Work: 

​This past week we focused on y and ey word patterns​.  We’re trying to use them in our writing and noticing them in our reading. We’re sorting words in order to find the patterns. Practice at home: Search for words with these word patterns in newspapers or magazines. Copy them and highlight the pattern.

 

Writing: We did some more blogging last week and worked on being more careful about proofreading. We want to take the time to monitor and clarify our writing too! Slow down the zooming through writing in order to make sure our posts make sense and have careful punctuation and spelling.

 

Last week, we also began our new ​writing unit, “Realistic Fiction”. We used a mentor text to find noticings of what is included in a realistic fiction story. Students began thinking about story ideas by thinking about something that happened to them and then changing the characters to reflect the fact that it is a fiction story. We will begin character and setting development next week after reviewing other mentor texts.

 

Math: This week we worked on Unit 4. This unit focuses on time to the nearest 5 minutes, place value and measuring using inches and centimeters. This week, we completed the lessons that focused on time (4.1-4.3) and two lessons on place value (4.4 and 4.7). We sent home the “at home review” earlier this week. IT IS DUE ON MONDAY, DECEMBER 19^TH. Please review it before sending it back to school so that your child can review concepts that they may need to practice.

 

The following are suggestions for IXL skills to practice during Unit 4. Reviewing skills we have already learned and trying new sills are encouraged as well!

 

IXL Skills to practice for unit 4:

·         Comparing and Ordering: B.2, B.2

·         Place Value: any of the M section.

·         Time: Q.1-Q.8

·         Measurement with inches and centimeters: S.2, S.8

 

Character Trait of the Month: GRATITUDE. Last week, we send home a gratitude journal which we would like your child to complete at home as homework this month. It is due December 23^rd, our last day before break. We take great pride in adding these character traits to your child's curriculum.  We feel it greatly helps your child to grow into a well-rounded, kind and caring human being.  Please continue to talk about these traits at home and we will do the same here at school! 

 

​

Be sure to wear boots, gloves or mittens, a hat, snowpants and a coat! This will be strictly enforced until ...May...probably. :(

 

Hope you had a great weekend and a wonderful snowday!

 

The Second Grade Teachers

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December 2, 2016

Dear Families,

We had a great week in school! Here are some highlights from our week.

Important dates:​

·  Tuesday, December 6th: Last day for Penny Drive

·  Wednesday, December 14th: Holiday Shop @ 4:30 - 8:00 pm

·  Thursday, December 15th: Holiday Shop @ 4:30 - 8:00 pm

·  Thursday, December 22nd: Grade Level holiday celebrations

·  Friday, December 23rd: Last day with students before break (full day)

·  Monday, December 26th: Holiday Break Begins

·  Monday, January 9th: Students/Staff Return from Break ​

​

Reading:

This week we finished up our book, The Name Jar and worked on a new thinking strategy called Sentence, Phrase, Word. We had to think really hard to come up with one word that was a powerful word for our story and then explain why. The explaining part was the hard part! They had to justify their answers and talk about what made them think that that word was the word that represented the story. Next, we will find a phrase that was meaningful and a sentence that was important to the story. We discussed the big idea of the story and what the message was. 

We also worked on close reading, with our informational text on our Scholastic News. Please remember that you have the password for the Scholastic website. Your child can practice reading to you from the website and share the videos that we watched on that topic. 

 Remember to encourage reading every day.  Encourage your child to talk about the reading and think about the big idea behind the article, chapter or the story. 

Word Work: 

​This past week we focused on oo word patterns​.  We’re trying to use them in our writing and noticing them in our reading. We’re sorting words in order to find the patterns. Practice at home: Search for words with these word patterns in newspapers or magazines. Copy them and highlight the pattern.

Writing: This week, we introduced Kidblog! The students learned how to log into their account, make an avatar for themselves, and start his/her first blog post.  The students are now welcomed and encouraged to blog and comment on others' blogs at home.  We did stress to the students that writing should be in paragraph form with a topic sentence, details, and a conclusion sentence before submitting for review​.  We also talked to the about the fact this is “KID BLOG” not “ ​TEACHER BLOG or PARENT BLOG"​. This means students should be writing this on their own with minimal help with spelling and/or writing ideas. If you notice a lot of misspelled words or missing punctuation, feel free to mention to them that they need to check over the spelling and punctuation (proofread) or their teacher won't publish, that may encourage them to get in the habit to do it on their own. I do help them with an occasional word so you can help them with a few words, but let them type them. Please try not to do it for them! We know that it is painful for you to see all of these mistakes, but it is better for them to fix them on their own in order for them to learn. They won't be perfect and that's ok! We'll also encourage them to edit at school if we see that they aren't ready for publication. We hope your child has a fun time blogging at home! We want this to be fun and exciting and we want them to want to write!  Next week, we will begin our new ​writing unit, “Realistic Fiction”.

Math: We reviewed today and will take our test on Monday.   Test cover sheets will be returned sometime next week.Some are still having difficulty with the counting back and counting up ten strategy. Please don't get too concerned. It's a really hard concept especially for beginning mathematicians! We'll continue to review, so they will see it again. Remember that the hardest part of the math test is the explaining part! If they can explain their thinking, then they know the concept! We will also be sending home the IXL skills, homelinks, and at home review soon for Unit 4.  Please keep the "at home review" in a safe place until you are ready to start reviewing at home.  

Character Trait of the Month: GRATITUDE. Please see the  homework sheet on gratitude that was attached to my email.  We are also sending a gratitude journal which we would like your child to complete at home as homework this month. It is due December 23^rd, our last day before break. We take great pride in adding these character traits to your child's curriculum.  We feel it greatly helps your child to grow into a well-rounded, kind and caring human being.  Please continue to talk about these traits at home and we will do the same here at school! 

Coats:  The cold weather has arrived!!! As a reminder, students need to remember to bring appropriate recess gear DAILY.  The school rule is that "If it is 60 or below, STUDENTS MUST WEAR THE COAT THEIR PARENTS SENT WITH THEM TO SCHOOL". ​You might want to check out your child's boots to see if those are ready to use, as well.  Please remember we may have 18 pairs of black boots and mittens, so labeling ALL your child's items is a very good idea. ​Thanks for making sure your child is prepared for the cold weather.​ 

Have a great weekend!

The Second Grade Teachers

November 19, 2016

Dear Families,

Important dates:

Nov. 21: Multi-cultural Feast at lunchtime (Please look over the note sent home earlier)

Nov. 23: ½ day, dismissal at 12:30

Nov. 24-25: Thanksgiving Break

 

​It was great seeing you at conferences.  I'm looking forward to a wonderful year with your kids.

​*Please note that next week we will not have a newsletter due to the Holiday and the short week.​

​​

Language Arts:

​In reading 

we

​continued reading our Book Club book, "The Name Jar," reading in small groups and discussing the book. Our focus has been on retelling, but the discussions have been rich with empathy and lots of questions. Please ask your child what this book is about. It's such a great book to go along with our PBL unit which focuses on diversity and new students and accepting similarities and differences.     

Word Work: We are focusing on the "oo" sounds and we'll continue next week sorting and working with words with the oo pattern.                   

 

                                       

In writing t

his week​ we introduced blogging!  Students learned about what a blog is and began creating

​

paper blogs.  Next week we'll learn about how to comment appropriately on

​other students' blogs

.  Soon, we will start to practice logging on and writing a blog online.  Blogging is a great way for students to practice writing because they love to write to a bigger audience. Eventually, students will be able to blog from home and share their blog posts with our entire class! Please do not log in to KidBlog yet at home, as we want to teach digital safety first.

 

Math: 

​Students are continuing to work 

on subtraction strategies

​ completing lessons 3.5-3.6.  We learned when to count up or count back for a subtraction problem, and the -0 and -1 strategy. Some children still need to practice the counting up strategy, drawing an open number line and showing the hops for counting up and finding the difference. They also need to be able to explain why they choose to count up or count back when solving a subtraction problem. Next week we'll begin to learn about "What's my Rule?" tables.  

Remember to practice math skills using the Home Links, Everyday Math online and IXL.

​  ​

Practice at home: 

​Ask your child when to count up and count back.  Give them a math problem and have them explain it through writing. Please be sure to practice basic math skills, such as counting change, counting above 100, telling time and explaining the strategies they use to solve math problems. I sent the Home Links as well as the review for the test home previously. Yesterday I sent home the answer pages to the Home Links because I noticed it wasn't on the Home Links pages.

 

PBL:  This week students brainstormed interview questions to ask students who are new to Deerfield or did not speak English when they came here.  Students are trying to stand in their shoes and figure out a way to make new students feel comfortable in the classroom.  They began interviewing students using the questions that they wrote, based on our Driving Question: How can we make our new students feel welcome in our school and community? We can't wait to see what they come up with!

 

 

Character Trait of the Month: RESPECT. Remember to work on your calendar!

Coats:  The weather will be colder next week! Remind your children to wear their coats! Also, please be sure to mark everything with your child's name.  This makes it easier to get a lost item back to its owner. 

 

Have a great weekend

​ and a great Thanksgiving,​

The Second Grade Teachers​

November 11, 2016

Dear Families,

Important dates:

Nov. 14-18: Book Fair

Nov. 15: ½ day Parent/Teacher conferences in the afternoon and evening.

Nov. 16: Picture Retake Day

Nov. 21: Multi-cultural Feast at lunchtime (Please look over the note sent home earlier)

Nov. 23: ½ day, dismissal at 12:30

Nov. 24-25: Thanksgiving Break

We had a fun week working on special projects for our entry way into the first and second grade wing! Thanks to the parent volunteers who put up our new paper. We’re looking forward to you seeing them at conferences!

Language Arts:

This week, we worked on retelling. Retelling is an important comprehension strategy. We focused on character, setting, problem, events, and solution in order to make sure we get the gist of the story. We're reading a book in group and discussing and retelling as we read. We are also writing responses to comprehension questions that we are thinking about as we read. Practice  retelling at home! After reading, talk about these story elements. We’re also working on building our stamina! Students are expected to read each day for at least twenty minutes. This is the best way to improve reading.

Word Work: 

We are focusing on long vowel patterns. We’re trying to use them in our writing and noticing them in our reading. We’re sorting words in order to find the patterns. Students are practicing while searching for words with the ai, ay, ea, ee and oa patterns. Practice at home: Search for words with these word patterns in newspapers or magazines. Copy them down on a piece of paper and highlight the pattern.

Writing: 

This week,  we’re working on writing a Thanksgiving essay. We are using the writing process to brainstorm, organize and create rough drafts about what we are thankful for.  Next week, we’ll revise and edit these and hopefully publish them!  We also want to mention that we work on writing throughout all subject areas. We are writing in reading workshop, writing in Social Studies, and even writing in math. We encourage you to start a journal at home and even have one in the car  to use for writing about anything!

Math: 

We started Unit three. We’re working on subtraction strategies. We’ve worked on Lessons 3.1- 3.4. Remember to practice math skills using the Home Links, Everyday Math online and IXL. Practice at home:  Give your child a math problem or story problem and have him/her explain how they solved it! Remind them to show other examples and even use a diagram to explain. Remember that basic math skills are always beneficial to practice at home. Simple addition and subtraction fact practice, counting change and telling time are things we encourage your children to practice at home!

Social Studies: This week we worked on distinguishing open and closed questions. Ask your child about these. We sorted questions that the children wrote in response to a statement, "Leaders create change."  At first, we sorted these questions according to whether or not they had anything to do with that statement. Some did not. Then we took those same questions and sorted them according to whether or not they were open or closed. This activity helped us when we began to create our own need to know questions on Thursday,  in response to our Driving Question, " How can we, a caring community of learners, welcome new families into our community?  Students will use those questions to create interview questions for new students. 

Character Trait of the Month: RESPECT. We take great pride in adding these character traits to your child's curriculum.  We feel it greatly helps your child to grow into a well-rounded, kind and caring human being.  Please continue to talk about these traits at home and we will do the same here at school! 

Coats:  We are still having issues with students not wanting to wear their coats! As a reminder, students need to remember to bring appropriate recess gear DAILY.  The school rule is that "If it is 60 or below, STUDENTS MUST WEAR THE COAT THEIR PARENTS SENT WITH THEM TO SCHOOL".  Often times, we will have the students say, "My Mom/Dad said I didn't have to wear a coat today".  Believe it or not, we have even had a few students who have been hiding their coats in backpacks, when they are asked to put their coats on.  Please talk to your child about this important school rule.  We appreciate your support and truly want the children to stay warm/healthy during this Fall/Winter season. Also, please be sure to mark everything with your child's name.  This makes it easier to get a lost item back to its owner. 

Have a great weekend!

The Second Grade Teachers