Some Super-Sweet Second Graders!

Parents,

As we enter our second full week of school, I am so thrilled with my "Oh so sweet" second graders! They are a wonderful group of students who are smart, happy, enthusiastic, and eager to learn. It's going to be a wonderful year!

This blog is a way to let you know what we have been doing and what we will be doing during the week ahead. I will also post student projects as we complete them. I hope you find this space useful! You may use the comments section to ask questions, or you may e-mail or call me!

Here is a run-down of what we will be studying this week:
Reading: story elements- recognizing characters, setting, problems, plot, and solutions in fiction stories that we read. We will also be analyzing characters on both the outside (what they look like) and the inside (what traits they have- shy, caring, greedy, etc.). Our story this week is Poppleton and the Grapefruit. Our reading and vocabulary tests will be on Friday each week. Work with your child to be able to use their vocabulary words in a sentence, not just know the meaning of the word. Knowing how to use the word in context is a higher-level skill and important in vocabulary acquisition!

Spelling- Our focus will be on the short e and short o sounds, along with final consonant blends, such as nd, nt, mp, sk, and st.

Language- the four types of sentences- Declarative (telling), interrogative (asking), imperative (commands), and exclamatory (excitement). Be sure to ask your students about special 'visitors' that will be helping us learn about these types of sentences!!

Writing- What Makes a Good Friend? writing- We will begin working on our first formal paragraph this week. Talk with your child about how they can be a good friend to others. Have them tell you examples of when they were a good friend or maybe when someone wasn't a good friend to them. It will help them add details to their writing!

Math- place value- We will be doing a deep review of the tens and ones place. This will be a foundation for the rest of the year! Your child will come home with a hundreds chart in a new page protector in his/her folder on Monday. This is for your child to use until they are confident without looking at it. Be sure to ask your child about +/- 10 and 1 cheer they learned on Monday! :) Our test over these skills will be on Friday.

Planner- We will be inquiring about being a good friend, what is a bully, and healthy habits. Our focus is on how to be healthy and happy- physically, mentally, and socially. Mrs. Bilbo, our librarian and computer research teacher, showed the class the healthyteeth.org website. The students learned how to find facts, take notes on those facts, and document their research in the spiral notebooks. I encourage you to go onto this website to help them learn more about taking good care of their teeth. I reward all inquiry and research that is done outside of class and then shared with the rest of the class! What a great way for them to learn AND for the rest of the class to learn along with them! Taking notes and picking out the most important information in a text are also skills we will work on all year long.

I'm looking forward to a wonderful week of school. I hope each of the students are as excited about coming each day as I am!

More working in my room

I spent today working in my room. So glad to have my jungle/bucket filler bulletin board up. I will put little monkey numbers on each bucket tomorrow to finish it off. I am please overall with how it turned out!

I also put stuff up on the closet doors. The empty border will hold our school newsletter and our class newsletter. Under the "There was homework?" sign I will write the homework for the day. I was tickled that Adam, my son, found the stuffed monkey in the closet when he cleaned out the closet in his bedroom. Love those leftovers from childhood! The bag on the right is a Dollar Tree find- A bottle bag. It is just the perfect size for my call-backs and attention-getters that I put on paint sticks that Sherwin Williams generously gave me! Best of all, the bag has elephants, zebras, and safari stuff on it! Perfect!! Oh the little things that make me happy! :)

Last, I put up my FACE for Cafe/Daily 5. I am toying with face or cafe. I think I am going to change it back to cafe because I like the idea of it being a menu of strategies to choose from while reading. It's simple, but I love the jungle/safari borders.

I also got some other organizational stuff finished. And I visited with co-workers. I love doing that! It was fun sharing ideas that they had found on Pinterest. I signed-up for it tonight after talking to them and can't wait to start pinning! It was neat to hear that what they thought were neat ideas for implementing in their classrooms- It was what I had already saved and planned on doing!

Going in EARLY tomorrow to finish up. Adam is going to help staple, sticky tack, and hammer tomorrow, so I should be VERY close to finishing up. Then on to making copies for the first days of school and meet the teacher night! So excited about school starting!!

Alisha