October 7, 2016

Dear Families, 

 

Important dates:

*October 11th:  Deadline for all Fun Run pledges and shout outs.

*October 14^th: Fun Run! (Second Grade10:40-11:00)

*October 31^st: Halloween parties-more info to follow

                                                        Goodbye Saya! We love you!

 

 We had another wonderful week at school, full of exploration and learning. Here are some highlights from our learning:

We had our first Kindergarten Buddy Get Together! Second Graders interviewed their buddies!

 

 

Character Trait of the Month

Thank you for all of your support with Empathy. We read lots of books and talked about our experiences with empathy.  Our new character trait of the month is: Self Control. Your child’s homework menu came home on Friday. During our LEAD time on Thursday, we practiced self control with our bodies with a freeze dance and read a great book on the topic.

 

​Box Tops​

We love to collect Box tops for our school! Here is another way to help our school you may not know about. All you do is download the app, take a picture of your grocery store receipt and you can earn double points on certain items. It is super simple!  Here's the website http://www.boxtops4education.com or just download the app on your phone. 

 

Holiday Donations for upcoming parties

Please review the letter that came home last week, regarding our upcoming team parties.  We are asking for a $7 donation to cover items such as:  Snacks, Craft Materials, Drinks, Game Materials, Paper Products, and Enrichment Materials.

 

Language Arts

This week in Reading Workshop we learned about using our schema to understand a story better and how to properly retell what happened in a book you’ve read.  Ask your child what information they should include when retelling a story! Next week, we will be working on decoding strategies to use while reading. In writing, we added to the ideas section of our notebooks by creating maps of our neighborhoods. Each map contained areas of importance to them and areas of danger (both great to get the juices flowing when trying to find a story idea). We will continue our personal narrative unit next week.

 

 Math

In math, we continued to review our routines for math workshop. Students learned about finding patterns when counting by 2s, 5s or 10s, and compared numbers using greater than or less than symbols. We completed lessons 1.10 through 1.11, and did a review for our first unit test. Students took the Unit One math test and results will be sent home on Monday. If you notice that your child needs more practice in a certain area, please practice at home. We'll also practice the same concepts at school over and over again until the concept is mastered. 
It is our district policy to not send tests home. If you would like to review the test, you can set up a time during the day to come to school to look at them, or they will be available during conferences. We will begin Unit 2 next week.

                                                 Our Giant Number Grid!

WIN (What I need)

This is a time students are able to work on “what they need”.  Students may be doing reading or writing activities, completing unfinished work, or working with the teacher on a skill they need.  We will be rotating between WIN and Science/Social Studies/PBL/Makerspace during this afternoon time. During STEM this week, students were challenged with building the tallest structure they could, using only 10 mini marshmallows and 10 toothpicks!

 

 

Social Studies

This week we started our first Social Studies unit that is centered around family and community. Students were put into groups, came up with an agreement for their group to abide by during each meeting and created team names. We also participated in a Chalk Talk thinking routine to see what family and community means to each person. Next week, we will be exploring what basic needs we need to survive and start building a map of our community.

  

Have a wonderful weekend! 

The Second Grade Teachers