Last week of School for 2017!

I'm sorry I'm a little late posting this week. It's been a crazy week already.  We have a busy, busy week.  Yesterday we had our School Spelling Bee. Congratulations to Raelyn Conard form our classroom who got 2nd place!

This week we have a few dress-up days; Monday-Christmas socks and hats, Tuesday-favorite holiday character, Wednesday- PJ Polar Express Day, and Thursday-Ugly Sweater Day. 

Our 2nd Quarter ends today Tuesday, December 19th.   If kiddos met their self-appointed AR goal then they will have their AR Party tomorrow in the afternoon. Then on Thursday, we have our Christmas Character Trait Assembly at about 8:15 am.  then following that we will have our Winter Christmas Party at 9:30 am.

This week in Math we will review addition and skills games.  In Reading, we completed a Snowman project where they had to create a snowman working in a group and then create an adventure story around it.

Last FULL Week of December at School in 2017!!

Did you see the title?? Oh my how it has flown.  This leads us into one of the busiest times of the year...Holiday Mart.  Each of our classes has a designated Library time throughout the week.  We will also use that time, for us on Tuesday from 12:25-1:05 to check out books and shop for our families.  This is totally optional but there will be items from 25 cents up to $15.  An envelope was sent home last week that if you would like your child to shop to send a few dollars and on the envelop write down who they need to shop for tomorrow. 

Starting in 2018 our Spelling tests will be the same but with a slight change for our Fridays.  Starting January if your child has only missed one on their Pre Wednesday test, they will be given the option of redoing it for a 100%.  It will be their decision whether they retry. If they missed 2 or more they will still have to retake their Friday list test.

This week we will be so busy with these target skills;

In Reading, we will start off with reviewing synonyms and antonyms. Then from there, we will read The Grinch Who Stoel Christmas and create a lapbook with cause and effect, summaries, sequencing, and comparing our traditions to the Who's.  After completion of this lapbook, we will move onto a Frosty/Snowmany project that will also mix writing into it.

In Writing, we will complete our Dear Santa letters so we can send them to the North Pole by Thursday so we can possibly see if he replies.  Then we will be working on a Frosty/Snowman writing adventure story.

In Social Studies we will look at saving and spending through the story Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday. We then go into discussing goods and services for a few days. 

In Math, we are working on reviewing 2 digit addition through games and problem solving until we leave for Christmas.

1st Full Week of December

The weather started our delightful with our new month.  However, this week just gets colder. So please encourage your kiddo to wear their winter jackets.  We might still go outside if the wind chill isn't too high to get our bodies up and moving around.

I sent home a book order last week for December.  If you or your kiddo was wanting to order books to have them in before Christmas break they need to be ordered by this Friday! Also if you were wanting to order something for Christmas let me know so I can hold it back and contact you separately.

This week our target skills are as follows;

in Reading; Three Little Wolves and the Big Bad Pig and Three Little Pigs, comparing and contrasting, new vocab; gobble, plenty, fragrant, usual, unusual, rude, dash, and approach

in Writing; 5 parts of a letter, coming up with wants and needs to write a letter to Santa, how to introduce ourselves inside of a letter, and persuasive techniques

in Math; adding 3/4 2 digit numbers, problem-solving, and reviewing adding more than one digit

in Social Studies; intro to Economics unit, green dragon dollars, income/expenses, wants vs needs, being money smart and money foolish

Last Week of November!!

It's amazing to me how fast this year has been going we are almost to halfway through the 2nd-grade year. I hope everyone enjoyed their Thanksgiving break. It always goes way too fast for me with eating, family, Black Friday shopping, and friends!

Thank you to everyone who was able to donate to our Friendship Feast last week.  We had so many donations we put it into bags for feast each Friday too!!

This week we will be working on the following target skills;

in Reading: Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No good, Very Bad Day, text-to-self connections, long e patterns, vocabulary: terrible, terrific, grumble, and scrunch, and syllables

in Wriitng; Don'ts Don't Wear Sneakers, My Little Sister Ate One Hare, silly animal sentence, and stories

in Social Studies; Life the Wampanoag Homestead, Life as a Pilgrim, and compare Native Americans to Pilgrims

in Math; regrouping ones as tens, adding 2 digits to 1 digit numbers, adding 2 digits with 2 digit numbers, and rewriting 2 digit problems

Thanksgiving Week

This is a super short two day week due to celebrating with our families for Thanksgiving.  I want to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving and pray everyone stays safe this week while away from school.

Tomorrow, November 21st, we will be having our Friendship Feast, Friendsgiving.  We celebrate through donated snack items, by mixing a big batch of snacks and getting all 3 classes together to enjoy.  Thank you to everyone who has donated snack items and we look forward to enjoying for tomorrow.

This week targets;

in Reading- turkey facts, following directions fun, presenting our book tri-folds and using context clues to figure out words

in Writing- complete our Bestie writing

in Social Studies- comparing Thanksgiving then and now

in Math- thanksgiving activities

Spelling Bee Winners

Yesterday we held our classroom Spelling Bee.  Our school-wide Spelling Bee will be held December 18th.  This is where all 3, 2nd-grade student winners will compete for a spell off. Our class winner was Raelyn Conard.  Our 2nd place and the alternate is Samantha Whisler. Congratulations!

Spelling Bee Week

Thank you to everyone who was able to help and support two of our teachers yesterday at the Green-Pollard Benefit!  Our community is such an amazing place because of you.  We had a huge turnout and were able to help some special families in our community.

This week we have our In-Class Spelling Bee on Thursday, November 16th at 9 am.  Each grade level has their own time. We will be practicing rules and procedures for the Bee this week along with practicing our words.  Everyone participates in this bee in second grade.  Then the winner from each of our 2nd-grade classrooms will go on to the school-wide Bee in December.

This week's learning targets:

Reading- author study of Cynthia Ryland

Writing- "Bestie" getting ideas from things we do with friends

Math-  repeated addition, repeated addition with arrays,  even and odd numbers, and reviewing number patterns

Social Studies- using symbols to tell a story, teepee's, fact and opinion, and the first Thanksgiving

Busy, Busy, Little Monsters!

Thank you to all our helpers last week at our Halloween Fall Party.  The kiddos enjoyed themselves and fun was had by all.

We do have our first Character Trait Award Assembly of the year tomorrow at 2 pm.  for September Raelyn Conard won for Responsibility and for October Hailer McKnight won for Courage.

This week in class we will have the following Learning Target Skills;

In Reading, we will read Jamaica Tag-Along and work with self-monitoring ourselves as we read.  This is where we stop and ask ourselves questions to check for understanding.  We will work with text to self-connections. We will work with long i sound patterns and with the following vocabulary; eavesdrop(per), accompany, and annoy.

In Writing, we will read Miss Tizzy and we will look at how we can get ideas from all the things that we like to do with our friends.  We have TONS of stories to tell others orally about what we have done with our friends but now let's write about it! We will look at what's called approximate spelling. We will continue to look at how we can add sight and sounds words for better visuals and then go into listening to others share their own writing. 

In Social Studies, we will continue to learn about Native Americans.  We start out with all the amazing things they used the buffalo for in their life.  We will read about what Native Americans did for fun and games.  Then we will look at how they communicated through symbols and told stories.

Finally, in Math, we will complete our small-unit on single digit addition and subtraction.  Then we go into reviewing skip counting by 2,5, and 10.  We will then look at problem-solving through finding a pattern.

Halloween!!

Happy Haunting!! Hopefully, everyone had an amazing 4 day weekend.  Thank you to everyone who came out to Parent-Teacher Conferences last week.  I'm sure I will see a lot of your faces today again at our Halloween Fall Party! Have a safe night tonight as well! Bundle up.

Even though this week is a tad shorter due to our long weekend, we will be very busy.   As our newsletter says, we will be keeping the Spelling words we received Thursday of last week for 2 weeks.  These all have mixed blends so we will keep them until 11-10.

This weeks skill targets;

In Reading; Read Girl Wonder: A Baseball Story in  Nine Innings by Deborah Hopkinson work with synonyms, homophones, and compound words, also short and long o words

In Writing; putting more sight and sound details into our writing, Read Shortcut by Donal Crews and A Night in the Country by Cynthia Rylant

In Social Studies, the first Americans (4 original tribes), and the homes of the Eastern Woodland Indians

In Math; missing addends, fact families, and 2 step word problems

End of 1st Quarter!

We are entering the final days of 1st Quarter.  Tomorow, October 17th is the last day.  It is the last day to meet each of the student's 1Q AR goal that they set at the beginning of the quarter.  This Friday we will be having our first quarter goal party.  If the student has met their goal then they will be attending it in the morning.  If they did not then they will stay in the classroom and work.

We will be keeping our new spelling words for this week and next.  With this Friday being a party day for our AR goals then there would be no time to post-test.  We will have a Pre-test this Thursday, October 19th. Next Friday we will be out of school due to comp days for Parent Teacher Conferences our post-test will be Thursday, October 26th.


This weeks target goals:

Reading- We will be reading the story Shelia Rae the Brave. We will review our past vocab words; tumble, swirling, compassion, and content.  This week's new words will be; fearless, fearful, familiar, and convince.  We will also review short and long vowels.  We will work on suffixes-less and -ful.

Writing- We will be working on sketching things around us that inspire stories. We will also work on fun things we do with our families. We will work on telling stories with details orally using appropriate leveled voice.

Social Studies- We will be looking at the 3 branches of government and what they do for us; their jobs;  and how we fit into the branches.

Math-We are working on adding 3 numbers, counting back to solve with number lines, and then subtract all or nothing.

Fundraiser Pick Up This Week

On Tuesday of this week, we will have Cookie Dough fundraiser pick up from 3-6 pm in the gym.  Things must be picked up during this time because there is no storage to house whats left as perishable items.

On Friday of last week, Parent-Teacher Conference slips went out to start to schedule times so we can meet to discuss your child's progress thus far this year. Please get those back as soon as possible with the best night and time for you.  If your child has a sibling, we get with the other teacher, to try and get their conferences close to each other.  However, we need the slip with times to do this.

I love to see so many readers in my class and so many kiddos trying to meet their AR Goal they set at the beginning of the year.  If you happen to have books at home that you are not sure of  their level then you may go to the following website and look it up; www.arbookfind.com


This week we will be working and learning the following targets;

Reading- comparing and contrasting between stories by the same author, looking at predicting what could change in a story if the setting were somewhere else, and reviewing long vowels with a final e.

Writing-  continuing to work on personal narratives and making sure we have a beginning/middle/and end, making a list of topics we are interested in to write about in future days

Social Studies- who is Christopher Columbus, and continuing types of landforms

Math- Unit 1 Addition properties, doubles and near doubles, and making a ten

First Week of October!!!

I can't believe we have already been in school for 27 days.  We have entered the month of October and it is busy!! This week we will be starting a few new things that I'm excited for to start. 

We will be starting a new Reading and Writing series. In this series, there are a lot of vocabulary words with some strong description every week!

In Reading, we will be working through the books McDuff Moves In and There's an Ant in Anthony. In these stories, we will be discussing story elements such as character, settings, and plot.  We will be working with 4 vocabulary words; tumble, swirl, compassionate, and content.  We will also review short vowel words.

In Writing, we will be looking at our past writing experiences.  We will be looking at getting ideas from things around us and our own drawings. We will be also working on sharing to others using eye contact and presentation voices. We will finish off the week discussing how authors get a lot of their ideas from real life.

In Social Studies, we will work on continents/oceans, moving into landforms, and our community from our world magnified into our neighborhood.

In Math, we will finish off our mini unit of time.  The kiddos have worked really hard with being able to slowly tell time to 5 minutes. We will then go into our second unit pretest of addition and subtraction.

I'm Back!!!

I'm back from Hawaii!  Man, it was beautiful.  However, I did miss my kiddos here. Our amazing sub-Mrs. McQueen said our kiddos were awesome and she would sub for them any day!!! So that's a big compliment.

I wanted to thank all our grandparents who were able to make it out to Grandparents Day last week.  I wish that I would have been here to met you all. So please give them a big thanks for me.

This week we are working on many things:

Reading: We will introduce our final Daily 5 center Work on Writing. If you have never heard of Daily 5 I totally recommend looking at it as an amazing tool to our Reading and Writing time. We will also work on Story Elements.

Writing: Main focus is working on complete sentences and 7up sentences

Social Studies: Making maps with keys/legends,  7 continents, and oceans

Math: Time to the nearest hour, half hour, and 5 minutes

Book Fair/Grandparent Day Week

I'm blogging a little early this time.  I will not be here at all next week.  I will be thinking on a sandy beach in Hawaii all next week. 😆😆 Even though I will be having a fantastic time I'm sure, I will miss my time here because I go crazy when I'm not with my MB kiddos.

So this week we are going to be working really hard with Mrs. Erin McQueen as my sub.  She is beyond amazing and I know she will have a great time because I have an amazing class this year!!!

We will also have Grandparents Day on Thursday, September 21st.  This year it is during the day from 8-11 am.  Each grade level has a separate time for grandparents to come inside the classroom, 2nd grade is from 9:30-10:00.  There will also be a  scavenger hunt that you may take your grandchild on and a book fair you may buy books at any time that morning!!  We do ask that our kiddos first come to class to get their lunch choice for the day.  We wish grandparents could stay for lunch but there would be no way to fit all in our lunch room.

In Reading we will be learning 2 more of our Daily 5 centers; Listen to Reading and Word Work.  We have built our stamina in Read to Self/Someone and it is the time where we believe they can handle to other 2.  The following week we will be learning about Work on Writing, the last of the Daily 5 centers. Last week we worked really hard with short vowel words. This week we will work just as hard but with long vowel words.

In Writing, we will hopefully complete our Square Me project for our introduction of Narrative writing.  On Grandparents Day we will be able to show off what we have been working on with this!

In Social Studies we enter our unit on Maps.  We will be learning about compass roses, map keys, continents/oceans, and the Equador/Prime Meridian.

Finally, in Math, we will complete our Place Value unit.  We will be working on Comparing numbers to 1,000, and then reviewing what we have learned.  We will have our 1st Math Assessment on Friday, September 22.

An Actual Full Week!!!

Yeah! We actually get to get back into the swing of things with a full week of school.  So we have tried to get as much learning into our full week that we can.  I wanted to let everyone know that I will not be here at all next week. I will be taking some time off to go on a small trip to...Hawaii.  I'm excited since I've never been. However, we will have an amazing sub, Mrs. Erin McQueen.

This week in Reading we will continue with our 2nd center Read to Someone.  We learned how to be a Coach of Reading.  We learned that to be a good coach, we must be encouragers for others since we want each of our classmates to succeed.  If our partner is struggling with a word then we have learned to ask Do you need coaching or time?   This is asking them do they just need a few more seconds to figure it out or do they need us to help with strategies we have learned?  Now we continue that this week and add in a lot of Word Work with short vowels.  We review all 5 short vowel sounds.

In Writing, we will begin our Narrative writing piece.  We start off this unit with reading the story Square Cat (last week).  Then we start to think of things that would be problematic and things that might be fun if one day we were to wake up and we were suddenly...square.

In Social Studies we complete our American symbols.  Today we will be looking into a September 11th remembrance.  It's crazy to think that the kiddos that are getting their licenses now were being born this year 16 years ago!! Then from here, we go into discussions of what we are really doing when we are saying The Pledge of Allegiance.

In Math, we will keep going forward with our Place Value unit. We will be learning how to Problem Solve with using Logical Reasoning(what we already know, background schema). We will work on reading and writing number words, counting by 5's, 10's, and 100's, and then comparing numbers to 1,000.

Read to Someone

This week we will be learning about our 2nd Daily 5 center, Read to Someone.  It sounds simple right?  However, there are different ways we can does this with a partner.  We will be discussing how to be an effective partner and coach.   The question we like to ask when we get stuck is Do you need time or coaching?  Do they just need a few more seconds to figure out the word or help?  Helping is not giving them the word, that's the last resort.  Each student will learn ways to help a partner correctly. We will also continue to work on reading appropriate leveled books.  They've been doing really great at this!!!

In Writing, we will talk about types of Narrative writing.  We will then go into reading the book Square Cat. We will start to discuss things we could do better if we were shaped as a square and things that might be problematic.  We will then go into One time I woke up and I was square... We will also be reviewing the 4 types of sentences.

In Math, we have started our Place Value unit.  We will learn how ones, tens, and hundreds relate to each other.  We will learn up to 1,000.

Finally this week we will learn about our American symbols and why they are important to us.  We will do a quick 2-day symbol group project.

Dragon Dollars

I know there have been questions about our Dragon Dollars earning system. We have a student choice list that starts at 25 dragon dollars and goes all the way to 200. They can spend it at 25 or save to get a bigger prize.  Instead of keeping all their tickets and having to recount them each time they each have a punch card.  Whenever they have 10, I can collect and hole punch their punch card.  Then when ever they want to spend the tickets they had collected they will tell me and I will let the office know.  I stapled the sets of 10 so they can take them home and show off a little So you can see that she has earned bucks already.  I go off of their punch card though so it will help with them keeping track of how many they have instead of having tickets everywhere.  So they did not lose any dragon dollars, they are still there. Hopefully, this clarifies any questions you may have.  If it does not then please just email me back. 😁😁😁

Homecoming!!!

Welcome to our first full week of school.  It's Homecoming after all.  We have so many things going on this week.  Let's start with our dress up days to go with supporting our High-School Homecoming:

Monday- Hat Day
Tuesday- Dress like your favorite teacher day
Wednesday- Pajama Day
Thursday- Rock Star Day
Friday- Dragon Pride Day and Parade at 1:30

Last week we took our STAR Reading assessment.  This gave us a specific reading range our students can use to pick good fit books.  This week we will use this reading range to chose an AR goal.  This is a goal that they want to hit for AR points each quarter.

            In Reading this week we will be learning 5 strategies to become better readers; Check for Understanding, Cross Check, Tune Into Interesting Words, Back Up and Reread, and Choose an appropriate level book. We will also continue to build our stamina in reading.
            In Writing, we will begin our Writers' Workshop with learning about what it looks like and sounds like.  We will be also working on reviewing sentence structures, nouns, and verbs.
             In Social Studies, we will study resolving disputes, communities, the common good, and being a good citizen.
             In Math, we will go into reviewing days of the week, months, and right/left. Then we will go to learning about our B.U.I.L.D centers.  Finally, we will start to learn about Place Value to 1,000.

Scavenger Hunt

Last week we started out with some get to know each other activities.  We talked about our first day jitters and things they wanted me to know about them.  We took an AR test in the library and talked about this year's incentive program for reaching their AR goal. From there we completed a scavenger hunt in our classroom to get to know where things were located.  We also started the first of our Positive Behavior System rule boot camps.  We started to review our lunchroom rules and how to walk and behave in the hallway.

This week this continues with; classroom procedures/behavior, bus behavior, recess behavior, and a continuation from last weeks lunch/hall. We will start our incentive program with Dragon Dollars and Class Bucks. This week inside our classroom, here are a few things we will learn about;

1. Daily 5 Reading system, read to self, building stamina, good fit books, how to use our library, and 3 ways to read a book

2. Setting up our Writers' Notebook and building our personal dictionaries

3. tattling versus reporting

4. modeling good versus bad behavior

Welcome Back!!!

We only have a couple of days left before our official first day of school.  I'm excited to meet all my new kiddos for 2017-2018.  This Tuesday, August 15th we have our Open House from 5-7 pm.  I look forward to seeing everyone and meeting all of our new Mid-Buchanan students!!! See you Tuesday!!