Happy Dot Day! :)

Happy Dot Day!

We have had a wonderful day celebrating Dot Day!  Check out all our pictures here.

We decorated cookies this morning for the surprise visitors, which were firefighters , who brought the truck over and allowed the students to tour the truck and learn about everything on the truck.  We gave them cookies and a Happy Dot Day poster.

We also used the iPads and the Quiver app with special papers to make our pictures look 3-D.  The app is free and so is the paper if your students want to try it at home also.  The kiddos also enjoyed eating our Dot Day Trail Mix and cookies this afternoon.

Thank you to everyone who donated items to make Dot Day a success!  The kids really enjoyed themselves! :)

Hurricane Relief

We have collected 158 items in our room so far for Wedgewood Elementary.  Monday is the last day to donate supplies.  Rhonda sent out an email today with information about supplies still needed if you would like to donate.

Curriculum Chat

Curriculum Chat is Tuesday, September 19 from 7:45 a.m.-8:15 a.m.  The students have been working on a book to share with you to tell you all about A Day in the Life of a Second Grader.  We will also have pictures of the kids working and share some information about what to expect in 2nd grade.  We hope to see everyone here.

Homework

The students did a nice job with homework this week.  Thank you for your support at home and signing each night.  The math section has changed slightly for next week's homework.  Each night students can decide between facts or games.  They aren't required to do one or the other on any night, but are still expected to do math, reading and spelling words each night.

Here is what we worked on this week and will be working on next week:

Word Study

We continued to work on no excuse words this week.  The words from this week are now words we expect the students to spell correctly in their writing.

Next week, we will continue adding words to our list of words we expect students to spell correctly.  The words for next week are because, come, friend, have, good, again.  Students are expected to practice these words for at least 5 minutes each night.

Reading

This week, we continued working on predictions.  We made predictions on The Legend of Rock, Paper, Scissors, Violet the Pilot and The Gruffalo.  Then we read the books to see if our predictions were correct.  The predictions are displayed in the hallway.  Make sure to check them out when you come to Curriculum Chat.

Next week, we will work on asking questions while reading.  We will be asking who, what, when, where, why and how questions.  We will be asking questions about the book as well as asking questions about why authors made certain choices within the book.

Writing

This week in writing, we wrote our The Day in the Life of a 2nd Grader book for curriculum chat.  We worked on writing complete sentences with capital letters and correct punctuation.

Next week, we will pick back up with our personal narrative.  We have written our first event, next week we will write our second and third event and then go back and write the beginning.  We have learned that students are more successful writing their middle and then going back to write their beginning so they don't tell their entire story in the beginning.

Math

This week, we worked on quarters, odd and even numbers, both identifying them and noticing patterns, then we ended the week by working on comparing numbers.  We also learned a new game.  It is called Number Top It and will be coming home next week as another homework game option.  The goal is to make the largest number possible, but also works on comparing numbers to identify the winner.

Next week, we will be wrapping up unit 1.  We will be exploring with base 10 blocks, dominoes and pattern blocks.  This will be working on adding groups of tens and using squares, triangles and circles to fill in rectangles.  We will be taking an assessment next week.  In Everyday Math, the assessment is taken over 2 days.  It includes a self-assessment, a written portion and an open response portion.  We will be doing the assessments on Wednesday and Thursday.  In your student's Friday folder is a letter about Unit 1 as well as some sheets you can do (completely optional) if you would like to review.  Next week, I will be sending home an introduction letter for Unit 2 which we will begin on Friday.

Social Studies

We started Junior Achievement this week.  This is a 5 week program (they come once a week) that teaches students about their community and the different types of jobs in the community.  Junior Achievement is taught by local business people.  Our community member is Ellen Dent from Callaway Bank.

We will also start our Geography and Culture Unit.  We will talk about how a community's physical environment affects the ways its members live and how the values, beliefs and experiences are shared by people in a community.  

Science

We observed our caterpillars this week and sadly 2 of them didn't make it.  We were fortunate to get a chrysalis that was about to turn into a butterfly on Thursday (Mrs. Ross's step-mom had one that she let the class have to see the whole process).  This morning after recess, the butterfly came out of the chrysalis, the kids were very excited and enjoyed watching it spread its wings and have them dry out throughout the day.  I released the butterfly into our butterfly garden this afternoon.