Sept. 29, 2017

Dear Families,

We had a busy week in school! Here are some highlights from our learning:

Reading- We continued to learn about character traits. We also practiced writing to a prompt based on our mini lessons. We looked deeper at the characters and tried to find out more about our characters based on what they say and do. How can you support your child's reading skills at home? Think about the characters in the books you are reading at home with your child. Talk with your child about the traits each character has (i.e. funny, sneaky, silly, mean). It can be fun to track if the character changed throughout the story!

Writing - The students learned how to use a circle map to help them plan out a story. Next, we learned about how to really grab our readers with a powerful lead. We started our first personal narrative and will work on revising and editing our stories next week. 

Math The students love working on their scrolls and challenge folders when they are done with their math assignments in class. We will be having our first math test this coming Tuesday, October 3rd. Please be sure you go over the review that was sent home at the beginning of the unit in preparation for this test. Thanks!

Social studies- We began our first unit with the students.  Our first unit is called, "What is a community?".  We will help students answer questions such as:

1. What is a community?
2. Why do families live in communities?
3. How are communities alike and different?

We started the week learning about ourselves and what kind of citizens we want to be this year. We talked about who we are and who we want to be. What are the words that describe our character traits? We also talked a bit about how our families are the same, but different.  We will continue with our unit next week as we look deeper into our what our community looks like by learning about maps.

Mrs. Carol our Mindful teacher will visit us next week! We'll send more information later when we set up a parent meeting date. 

Important dates to remember:

Tuesday, October 3rd Bingo Night (6:00-8:00 p.m.)

Wednesday, October 4th Picture Day and Count Day

Thursday, October 19th DCC Parent Meeting

Have a great weekend!

The Second Grade Team

Our Amazing Week!

Dear Families,

We had another successful week with your child! We celebrated National Peace Day on Thursday. The students created pinwheels with Mrs. North and put them outside to be displayed. It was a beautiful display!  We mentioned "Cultures of Thinking" at our Curriculum Night, and this year our focus as a school will be on the force of language. First, we're working on the habit of using our manners. Saying "Please" and "thank you" are very important to creating a culture of respect. Please review this important habit at home. It creates a friendly and polite atmosphere and encourages thoughtfulness. Another way that we practiced using our language last week, was learning how to say Good Morning to one another using eye contact, a friendly handshake and our names. Working so closely all day in a classroom with twenty two children in one room can sometimes get a little too cozy so they need to learn how to look someone in the eye and say, "Please stop!" and that NO means NO. It's great to use your words in a firm, assertive tone to get someone to leave you alone or stop a behavior that you don't like. All of these strategies will help to build our classroom community and hopefully we will see these manners carried through on the playground and at home.

Reading- This week during reading we read a couple of books with characters that have very strong character traits. We talked about the different adjectives or traits that described the main character. We also wrote about the character and the problem and solution in our "Thinking Notebooks." These notebooks are where students will share their thinking about a reading, science, social studies or a specific learning topic. We're focusing right now on the procedure of the notebook, writing the date, the title, the target, and answering both questions from the prompt. We also filled our Book Baggies to the brim with books that we are excited about reading. Students are building their stamina and working toward reading for a full 20 minutes! We'll get there!

Word Work: This week students created a Word Collection Book to begin to collect words. They set up the short vowel pages and began to collect short vowel words. Ask your child to tell you about their book and tell you about short vowels (they're really not "short"). ;)

Writing - We're working on setting up our Writing Notebooks and creating maps with our writing ideas. We created our first map, which was a heart map. This map has many of the things that your child loves on it or adventures that they've loved. Students can use this map to get ideas for their personal narratives. Next week, we'll create another map and then get started writing a personal narrative.

Math - Thanks for all the paper towel rolls! We made our number scrolls last week. This is a fun way for students to learn the patterns of numbers. It's interesting to see how when second graders start writing in the hundreds, they get confused on how to write them. Scrolls are an amazing and fun way for them to practice. We worked on number grids, recognizing patterns and playing the number grid game which helps students to practice how to travel and count on a number grid. We worked on the procedures of math workshop and are getting the hang of math workshop expectations. We will be finishing up our first math unit next week and the test will be the following week. Please use the Unit 1 Review that was sent home to help your child prepare for the test. You don't need to send that back to school.

Makerspace- We had our first Maker Space this week. We went over expectations for this space and talked about collaboration.  The students had a chance to work with others to build something using materials at a table of their choice. We saw several unique structures and enjoyed seeing the student’s creativity. We look forward to spending more time in the Maker Space this year!

NWEA- This week your child had the pleasure of taking the NWEA tests. It requires stamina and some patience with the technology. We had a few technical difficulties, so a few children will finish next week. We will share the results during conferences in November. These tests give us a baseline of your child's skills in reading and math and help us to plan for instruction.

Seesaw: Because of the tech issues and testing last week and next week, we haven't had access to our Ipads or Chrome books to make entries into Seesaw. Please be patient with us, as soon as testing in all classrooms is finished we should be good to go! We're excited to share all of the great learning experiences that we've been having!

Friday Buddies- This week is our first week meeting our buddies from a different grade. Please ask your child about the ice breaker activity they did with their buddy class. We had fun meeting with our third grade buddies!

Important dates-

     October 4th: Picture Day.  Information went home last week.

Have a wonderful weekend!

It's Going to be a Great Year! 2017

It's Going to be a Great Year! 2017

Another Great Week!

Dear Families,
Thank you so much for your time at Curriculum Night. We enjoyed sharing our plans for the year and we are grateful that we had the opportunity to have this time with you. We hope that you feel a greater understanding of second grade. We are so proud of our school and our community support! Please don't hesitate to email or call any time with questions or concerns. Like we said, these first few weeks are all about creating a learning community, collecting data and analyzing the data to set goals. Spending the time to create a learning community, set behavior and learning expectations, and collecting our beginning of the year data, we will be able to launch into a successful year.

We had another great week! We continued to build community and get to know each other and make new friends. We worked together on a Chalk talk thinking routine that helped us to figure out what we want our classes to look like, sound like and feel like. Students wrote down their opinions of what they think are important qualities of a classroom community. We noticed that there were some common themes and created a list. We chose 7 important things and from that list we were able to create our classroom Mission Statement. It was amazing to see what seven year olds listed as important, in fact  they are very similar to what adults want in their workplaces, homes and communities!

                         
                                                       We started with these chalktalks....

                             
                            Which led to this list....       and then finally our Mission Statement!
                                                 Pretty Powerful, those thinking routines!

Reading: In reading this week, we organized our book corner books so that they will be easy to pick out and easy to put away! These are not "leveled" books but books that may entice kids to read. Students are welcome to choose these books for their book baggies as well as leveled books. We are trying to encourage children to choose books that are "just right" for them. This means that they they are interested in the topic or the genre and that they can read them without too much difficulty. We are spending time reading and building our stamina.

               
                     These were our books of the week!  Ask your child about the word kerfuffle!
                 

Also, we've read many mentor texts with empathy as the theme. One of our favorite books is called "The Invisible Boy." We used a thinking routine called "Step Inside" to step inside the character to feel what the character felt. We wrote from the character's perspective using dialogue and thought shots to explain the character's thinking. This helps the reader to connect to the character while learning about character traits.

                                               This is a great book! Be sure to take a look!

Scholastic News: We are so fortunate that our district purchases subscriptions for Scholastic News. These newspapers are a  big part of our reading and Social Studies curriculum. We teach nonfiction reading strategies every Friday morning. When you see these coming home, please take the time to read them or discuss the topic with your child. We teach them to use "Tracks of a Reader" while reading to help them to connect with the text. You will see a lot of little marks all over the page. This means that your child is THINKING while reading! Yahoo! Ask your child what these tracks mean and talk about the cool facts that you learn from these little papers!  Check your password papers for passwords to online Scholastic, there are super fun little videos and great articles!

Writing: Students were given a writing  prompt for their first writing attempt of the year. This will  provide us with a baseline of  each student's writing abilities which we will  use to plan writing goals. We began to organize our writing binders and we will be starting our personal narrative unit next week!

Math:  We've spent the week learning and practicing routines for math workshop. Students reviewed previously taught math concepts at Independent Math to Self time, played math games at Math Choice time, and worked in small groups during Teacher Time. This unit consists of reviewing concepts from first grade. It's a pretty easy unit for many of our students, but be sure to look over the home links and the Everyday Math Games just to make sure that they are feeling confident with these skills.

Important dates:

October 4th: Picture Day.  Information will go home today (Friday). Check Everyday Folders!

Have a wonderful weekend!

Our First Week!

Hello Families,

We had a great first week together! It has been so much fun learning about one another and getting back into our school routines. We will continue to do a lot of activities next week to help build our classroom community. Our number one concern at this point, is that your child feels safe, comfortable, and a valuable member of our classroom family.  Thank you for sharing your child with us! We are truly enjoying them and can’t wait to have an awesome year with them.

 Math and Writing: We are learning the routine of math and writing and sharing our favorite "lucky" numbers.

Important reminders:

*Curriculum night will be Thursday, September 14^th. Mrs. Bedford’s presentation for K-2 parents will be from 5:00-5:30. Then you will be able to come down to the second grade wing from 5:30-6:30pm, for our presentation. The 2nd grade team will be giving the presentation together as a team. Our Specials teachers will be holding a session for parents wishing to attend from 6:30 to 7:00. If you are unable to attend, we will be sending home the PowerPoint via email after Curriculum Night.

*Picture Day will be Wednesday, October 4th.  More information will be coming home at a later date.

*Snacks and Water Bottles-We will have  time for two healthy snacks a day.  We will eat them mid-morning and mid-afternoon. These snacks are meant to help nourish the body and brain throughout the day, so I cannot emphasize enough, the importance of them being healthy snacks.  Cookies, chips and candy are great for a treat during lunch, but I will ask students to keep these goodies in their lunch box until then.  Some great healthy snack ideas are: fresh fruit, cheese, crackers, hummus, hard boiled eggs, popcorn, veggies & dip, etc.  Some parents feel that their child doesn’t need to eat snacks throughout the day.  This is up to you as the parent, but from my experience, students will get quite hungry throughout the day, especially once they see other students eating around them. Reminder: No nuts of any kind because of severe nut allergies in our classroom.

Many students prefer using a water bottle over than the drinking fountains in the classroom.  I am completely fine with this, but ask that students keep their water bottles in a leak-free bottle, at their seat.  Spills will absolutely happen, but the more we can avoid this with spill-proof bottles, the better! Also, water will be the only drink allowed in the classroom to avoid sticky spills and stains. Thank you so much for your support with this!

                                                                            Fun at Recess!

                                                                 Inspecting turtle eggs...

*Lunch-Our lunch schedules have changed a bit this year. Instead of going to lunch and recess as a grade level, we will be going to lunch with two Kindergarten classes and two First Grade classes. Our class, along with Mrs. Maynard’s class, will be going to recess first and then lunch.  Mrs. Fox’s class and Mrs. Armstrong’s class will be going to lunch first and then recess. Students will be going to lunch at 11:30am and returning to the classroom after recess at 12:10pm. This schedule will remain the same for the entire year. Lunch and recess will still each be 20 minutes, just as they have been in previous years.

If your child is buying lunch, it would be helpful if you could go over their options with them before coming to school in the morning. Lunch menus can be found on Deerfield’s website.  I have attached September’s menu here:  http://www.novi.k12.mi.us/district/fs/school-menus--nutritional-information/df/

  

*Everyday Folder- Please be sure to look at any notes in your child’s daily folder and send your child’s daily folder back to school every day.

*Art Shirt and P.E. Shoes- If your child doesn’t have an art shirt at school, please send one in as soon as possible. Also, be sure your child has tennis shoes for P.E. class on our gym day! You can find our class’ specials schedules on the back of your child’s Everyday Folders.

*Dismissal- As a reminder, teachers are not allowed to let children enter the parent pick up line, if they regularly ride the bus (or are CARE) WITHOUT a note from his/her parent. Thank you for understanding! We want to keep your children safe. If your child has a change in the way they are getting home for that day, please send a written note. If the change happens AFTER your child is already in school, please call the office to let them know.  They will make sure I get the message.  If you send an email, I don’t always have a chance to check this during the day, so I would not be aware of this change.  If you have any questions or concerns, please contact me.

*Birthdays-At Deerfield, we do birthdays in a unique way.  Instead of the birthday child bringing in a treat to celebrate their special day, they can bring in a book or a small game to donate to the classroom.  Please note, this is NOT a mandatory thing.  It is completely optional to send in something on your child’s birthday.  If you do not send in something, we will still have a birthday celebration for your child in a birthday circle. If you would like to have your child open a present for the class, here are some ideas:

1.    Donate a game for the students to enjoy throughout the year. We are always in need of games for the students to play during indoor recess!

2.    Donate a toy for outdoor recess.  Students enjoy playing with chalk, balls, hula hoops, etc.

3.    Donate new pencils/checking pens for the students to use.

4.    Donate items for STEM/STEAM activities such as Legos, blocks, brain teaser activities, etc.

It is the school’s policy to not allow food as a birthday treat because of allergies.  Thank you for your understanding!

*Volunteers-At times, classroom teachers need help with tracing, coloring, cutting, gluing etc. and preparing projects for the children.  We also need volunteers for book check in/check out for our reading program, special projects and holiday parties throughout the year.  Some of these projects can be done at home, while others are easier to do in our project area at school. Whenever I need some assistance, I will send out an email to check for volunteers. Thank you so much in advance!

*Blog-My newsletters will be on my blog each week.

Have a great weekend! We look forward to another fabulous week with your lovely children!

The Second Grade Teachers