Up, Up, and Away!

Wow, what a busy full first week of school! We are spending a lot of time learning about our classmates and how our classroom works in order to make our classroom a safe and fun place for learning.

A Peek At Our Week:

Social Studies: As a class, we developed our hopes and dreams for second grade. Each kiddo created a social and academic goal they would like to accomplish by the end of the school year. We will revisit these goals throughout the school year and discuss the steps we need to take in order to accomplish them. Keeping our hopes and dreams in mind, we talked about what our classroom needs to look like/run like in order to successfully reach these goals. We brainstormed ideas and came up with our three classroom rules: 1. Take care of ourselves 2. Take care of others 3. Take care of our school. Each day, our kiddos are working hard to make our classroom a better place!

Math: This week, I began to get to know your child as a mathematician! We spent time brainstorming what math means to us, and realized there isn't always just one right answer. We know that everyone learns differently, and that is OKAY! We began Chapter 1 midweek. Be sure to read the home-school connection that went home in your child's homework folder. This will show you exactly what your child is learning during this chapter.

Reader's Workshop: We spent the week learning and exploring our classroom library, choosing "just right books" and building our reading STAMINA!

Shared Reading: Ask your child about the wonderful books we read about September 11th and what they learned. I'm sure they have already shared so much with you. They just couldn't contain their excitement about this!

Word Work: Students took their spelling inventories this week. Next week students will be placed into small groups in which they will begin word sorts and learning about how words are spelled.

Writer's Workshop: Since our writer's notebooks will soon be filled with the stories of our lives, I thought it was important for students to make their notebooks a reflection of themselves. Students decorated their notebooks on Monday, and by Tuesday, they were writing away! Our wonderful writer's practiced brainstorming topics to write about and began drafting about topics of their choice.

Daily 5: Students practiced and worked independently at our Read to Self station and our Read to Someone station. Ask them all about it!

I look forward to meeting all of you at back to school night! As always, please feel free to contact me with any questions.