Happy Read Across America Day! On March 2nd we celebrate Dr. Seuss' birthday by spending some extra time reading. Since this day does not fall during the school week this year I'm encouraging students to take some time out of their day tomorrow to snuggle up with a good book! We began our Seuss celebration (a Seuss-abration, lol) today by making "Cat in the Hat" hats with our rhyming spelling words written on the stripes. On Monday we will continue to celebrate all things Seuss while sporting our fine new hats. Students are encouraged to bring in any Seuss stuffed animals they have at home (or any favorite stuffed animal) to be their reading buddies on Monday. In math this week we continued working with money and making change. Students participated in a coin game where they needed to continuously make change to have a few coins as possible. Next week the class will be taking a mid-unit assessment to see how they are progressing. Please practice identifying coins with your children at home. As you empty your pockets or purse each night ask your child to count your change for you. This simple activity will greatly benefit your child and provide you with some great 1-on-1 time! In literacy this week we introduced some new Common Core "I can" statements as we began working on determining the main ideas of multiple-paragraph texts. This task proved difficult for most of the class and is something that we will continue working on next week. A complete list of this week's "I can" statements can be downloaded below.
Our week in Pictures:Don't forget you can visit these great sites at home 24/7:
P.S - The afternoon ran away on us today and after the busses left I noticed that our weekly reflections are still on my desk! Oops :-) Check for them in your child's folder on Monday.
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What a week it has been in second grade! A blizzard, science fair, and Valentines day. Oh my! We visited the Science Fair this week and the students were extremely impressed with everyone's project. I think the one that caught our attention the most was the robot that solved a Rubik's cube! Students participated in a give-one-get one activity after the science fair where they shared one fact and received one fact with classmates. In literacy this week we began to switch over to the Common Core (new National standards). Our weekly theme was about helping planet Earth. Students focused on non-fiction text from our Treasures books and Scholastic Newsletters. Each week students will be receiving a list of "I can" statements. These correlate with the Common Core standards for second grade and will be different each week. The work students complete towards mastering each "I can" will be stapled to the statements and sent home at the end of the unit. I have attached the file with this week's "I can" statements so you can see what our classroom focus is and will continue to be next week. In math this week we began working more in depth on money concepts. Today students were given a challenge and asked to use a certain number of coins to show an amount. Students worked with play money and did a great job problem solving. Our classroom saw some physical changes this week! Due to the social nature of our students I decided to swap out some of our tables for desks. I am hoping that the desks will allow students to focus more on their own work and not on what others are doing around them. We also now have a "quiet corner" in the classroom. It looks something like a cubicle and provides students the opportunity to focus intently on their work. Next time you're in the building stop by and check it out!
Our week in Pictures!My first week back to work is officially over and we are off to a good start! Ms. Vocatura was in with us on Monday to help our class through the transition. It's great to see all the progress the class has made in the past three months! The students worked well this week though they have been very social which I'm assuming is due to the transition. My hope is that by next week the class will be used to having me back at the helm and things will calm down. In literacy this week we read a non-fiction selection about how animals bathe. Students worked on comparing and contrasting and used adjectives to describe the animals. We connected our literacy theme to our new science unit on living and non-living things during a classroom discussion. Next week we will be exploring the relationship between cause and effect as we continue to read about animals. We will also continue to work with r-controlled vowels in spelling.
Information on the Read to Ride program went home this week. This is a wonderful opportunity for students to work on their reading and provides great incentive. Please remind your child to bring in their Read to Ride reading logs weekly to be entered into the contest to win the bike. Reading logs turned in one week late will not be accepted. Remember the more consistent your child is with their reading log the more chances he/she will have at winning the bike. (These reading logs are separate and in addition to our class weekly reading requirement) I hope everyone has a restful and enjoyable weekend! See you next week :-)
Finally got my iPad all charged up so I can now upload our pics from this week. Hope you all have had a great weekend! - Mrs. D
This week in literacy we focused on making predictions as we read "My Name is Yoon". It is a story about a young girl trying to adjust to school after her family moves from Korea to America. We also continued to practice identifying main ideas and details of text. Yesterday students made "tables" to symbolize the importance of details and how they support the main idea. Students took a quiz on main ideas this afternoon. I will be scoring them this weekend and they will go home on Monday. We continued to work on subject and predicate this week and even began to combine similar subjects and predicates into one sentence. A new focus of grammar this week was quotation marks. To practice, students used elbow pasta to add quotation marks to sentences written on sentence strips. Our focus in math this week was on more subtraction strategies. We used blocks and part-part-whole mats to help us find missing addends, we played a game using dice to help review fact families, and we used snap cubes to help us explore difference. Today we began working on story problems (word problems) and students did very well. The new Common Core standards really focus on students being able to explain their thinking. While working on story problems today students were asked to finish the sentence "I know I'm right because…" using the strategies we have learned in class. I am very pleased with the results of today's activity and we will continue to practice this skill next week. Reminders/Announcements:
Don't forget about the fantastic sites we subscribe to:These sites are ready and waiting for you 24/7! I can't think of a better way to practice math, literacy skills, and track your reading!
Have a great weekend! ~Mrs. D P.S. - Pictures of our week will be uploaded later. The battery on my iPad died and I don't have the charger here at school. Check back this weekend! It has been an interesting week in second grade. Students this week were chattier than usual and needed several reminders to focus on the directions of assignments. The highlight of the week was working in the computer lab on Wednesday on our plant science unit. After reviewing plant vocabulary, students logged on to a website called Wordle to create graphic images of the vocabulary words we discussed. Students had a great time experimenting with the site and got a chance to practice their typing skills! I hope to have pictures of the Wordles students created up on our website sometime next week.
All teachers at FMS attended a workshop yesterday about the Common Core (the new national education standards) and how it will change our literacy instruction. I walked away with some great ideas that I hope to be weaving into our curriculum over the next few weeks. One of the most important things we need to work on is to help our students independently discuss and compare texts. Be on the lookout for some suggested reading response questions on our parent/educator blog that you can use at home while reading with your child.
Reminders/Announcements:
~ Mrs. DIt's hard to believe that we have been in school for 5 weeks already! It is true when they say that time flies when you're having fun :-) In math this week we focused on developing addition strategies to help students master basic math facts. Students wrote addition stories (word problems) and practiced "counting on" using an open number line. An open number line is similar to a traditional number line however it's numbers are not labeled. This will help students to visualize number lines as we move on to solving more complicated problems. Today we worked with another addition strategy: doubles plus 1 and doubles plus 2. We used what we know about doubles (4+4, 6+6) to help us solve other addition problems. We will continue to develop these strategies next week. We read "Fighting the Fire" in literacy this week and discussed how nonfiction articles can be broken into main ideas and details. Students worked collaboratively to complete graphic organizers showing the main idea of "Fighting the Fire" and provided details from the text to support it. This week we also discussed parts of sentences: subject and predicate. Students used white boards to identify the subjects of sentences that were written on the board. The concept of predicates was a little more challenging for some to understand and we will continue to work on it next week.
Reminders/Announcements:
Have a great weekend!
~ Mrs. D It has been another great week in second grade! This week we finished our first math unit on reviewing number and time concepts. Today we took our first math test and I am proud to announce that the class did FANTASTIC! The average score for the class was 90%! I want to thank parents for reviewing the practice test at home with their children :-) We achieve the best results for our students when we work together! Next week, we will continue to review some concepts of time and money as we shift our main focus to addition and subtraction strategies. In literacy this week, we read "Mr. Putter and Tabby Pour the Tea" by Cynthia Rylant. While reading we focused on story structure: beginning, middle, and end. We began working in reading groups this week and students worked cooperatively to create beginning, middle, and end posters for their texts. Students also started working on Fall activity centers this week. They played Halloween phonics Bingo, Guess the Scarecrow, and read books about Johnny Appleseed. Our class had a visit this week from Captain R (aka: Mrs. Dempsey)! Captain R led the class in a lesson on r-controlled vowels (Arrr Matey!) in celebration of International Talk Like A Pirate Day on September 19th.
Reading-Rewards: Don't forget to continue logging your reading on Reading-Rewards.com! As a class we are up to 1,648 minutes!! Our Reader of the Week this week was Shamus who read an amazing 84 minutes! I love seeing the variety of books everyone is reading. It seems like soon some students will have enough RR miles saved up to start purchasing class rewards! Keep up the good work everyone! (If for some reason you cannot access the site, then write down what you read, bring it in, and we will log it at school) Reminders:
Have a great weekend! ~Mrs. D
We've had a great week in second grade! We are continuing to review number and time concepts in math. This week we worked with two-digit numbers and focused on the concepts of greater/less than and odd/even. Students created "super sorter machines" and sorted numbered balls as they traveled through the "pipes". We began working with our literacy program this week (Treasures). Students read the story "David's New Friends" about a boy who nervously starts school but ends up making an unlikely friend with the class pet lizard. We discussed character and setting and students worked on answering comprehension questions. A skill we are going to focus on and develop this year is restating the question in our answer.
Reminders:
Exciting News!
I am pleased to announce that Ms. Kristen Vocatura will be my long-term substitute while I am out on maternity leave. Ms. Vocatura is a familiar face in the building. She has been a substitute here in the past and last year completed her student teaching in Mrs. Owen's second grade class. Please help me welcome her to our classroom at next week's Open House! Have a wonderful weekend! ~Mrs. D |
AuthorMrs. Dempsey Archives
May 2013
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