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.
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!
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