The first three weeks

Our first three weeks of school has flown by! The students in room 204 have been reading and writing, doing math and observing Cassiopeia. We have spent a huge amount of time talking about how our classroom should be and learning the routines that we will follow for the whole year. That's the big-picture overview. Here's more specifics:

Morning Meeting:
We have been learning how to say good morning or hello in other languages! So far, we have heard Arabic, Spanish, Hawaiian, Japanese, Mandarin, Farsi, Pashto, Turkish, Russian, Romanian, English, and Vietnamese. If your family knows any others, practice at home and share with us.

We keep track of the weather every day. September has been a very sunny month!

We learned three songs: "Hello There!", "Down by the Bay", and "This Land is Your Land". Ask us to sing one for you.

We learned three games: magic number, captain's coming, and the game where we roll the ball to each other while saying good morning to each other and which doesn't have a real name.

Reader's Workshop:
So far, we have done some spelling, alphabetizing, sorting, reading, talking about books, writing about books, thinking about books, and doing crossword puzzles. We came up with giant lists of words that have other word parts in them (such as /am/ is in Sam and flammable), rearranged mixed up sentences, and corrected a host of mistakes in the morning messages. We will be starting guided reading groups in October.

We are finishing an author study of Peter Brown. We read The Curious Garden, My Teacher is a Monster!, Children Make Terrible Pets, I Want to be Your Friend!, Mr. Tiger Goes Wild, and Creepy Carrots (which was written by Aaron Reynolds and illustrated by Peter Brown). We thought about what was the same and different in his books. We like that he often makes his books "circle stories", where what happens at the beginning happens again at the end, with a twist. We will have a new author study in October.

Writer's Workshop:
We wrote a lot already! Writing at the beginning of the year is focused on developing personal narratives - true stories about our lives. We made lists of our ideas, planned out our story before we started writing, and talked with writing buddies when we were stuck. We are going to be doing a lot of writing this year, and we are ready.

Social Studies:
We thought about our class and school community. We made lists of behaviors we want to see in school, thought about a time when we were polite and said "please," and are working towards coming up with four or five rules to live by.

Science:
We just started observing our class pet, Cassiopeia. She finally stopped shedding (for now) and she wouldn't be too stressed out in coming to school. We will start learning more about observation next week.

Math:
We love math! We are working with three digit numbers. We order them from least to greatest (and vice versa), compare them by saying and writing "greater than," "less than," or "equal to", and add or subtract 1, 10, and 100 from them. We also write them in standard form (276), word form (two hundred seventy six), and expanded form (200 + 70 + 6). To help us practice, we played some math games.

You can play our math games at home, too! Use a regular deck of cards to play "double compare" or "pick a three digit number" and have the face cards as wild cards.

Computer Lab:
We learned how to visit a website today. Type in the address into the address bar, press "enter", and you are there! It is important to spell a website address correctly, otherwise you might be learning about the English town of Goole rather than conducting a search at Google.

We went to maps.google.com and found our houses and the school! We could look at a satellite view and see which of our neighbors has a swimming pool, and we could even drive from our house to school using the street view function.

Next week, we will start learning about writing computer codes.

IC:
These groups had their first two meetings this week. As each group has its own focus, ask your student what they worked on this week. 

Snack: 

We talked about using good table manners, only eating one snack, and why it is important to bring a healthy snack. You can work with your student to choose a healthy option for them to bring.

Doing your best work: 

We looked at this picture made by a first grader. What did this person forget to do? It is always important to do your best work, and to check before you are sure you are done.

Second grade skills for life:

If you find that you often forget the same thing again and again, how do you help yourself solve that problem? One good strategy is to make a sign or some other visual reminder. Here's one that a student made for me:

Lastly, I don't see a pencil over there. Do you? The students in our class keep saying something about seeing a pencil.

We have a great year ahead of us! If you have any questions, please let me know.