The first three weeks!

The first three weeks of school have flown by! The students in Room 204 have been hard at work: reading, writing, drawing, discussing, comparing, solving, playing, and thinking. We are working on building our class culture, learning school routines, and developing rules to live by. We have been kind and friendly, curious and careful.

Housekeeping News:

Back to school night is next Thursday, October 1st. Second grade starts in the gym at 6:30 pm for a presentation by Ms. Kaplan, then goes to classrooms from 6:45 to 7:15, then visits the specialists in the cafeteria from 7:15 to 7:45.

School Site Council meets next Monday in the Library from 7 to 8 pm.

Check out Ms. Kaplan's blog for regular school updates and news: http://mskaplanlowell.blogspot.com/

Check out our class website: bit.ly/204rocks

blog: bit.ly/204blog

and Instagram: @lowell204

Here's a quick overview of what we've been working on so far. For more pictures (and videos!) check out our blog: bit.ly/204blog

Reader's Workshop

We are reading a variety of narratives. We started with books about school (Chrysanthemum, Clark the Shark, and I Was a Second Grade Werewolf, among others), moved on to some fun Mo Willems books, and began an author study of Peter Brown.

We also started learning some of the routines and activities we will be using during word study this year.

Writer's Workshop

We started the year writing true stories about our summers. We discussed and practiced making a graphic organizer to plan out a story before writing, making a list of ideas, adding detail, changing words from boring to amazing, and practicing spelling tricky words on the back of our paper. We also widened the scope of what we can write about. Instead of just focusing on true personal narratives, some children are choosing to write fictional narratives so they can develop story problems and solutions.

Math

Our first math unit of the year has focused on reading, writing, understanding, and comparing three-digit numbers up to 1,000. We also added and subtracted 1, 10, and 100 from three-digit numbers.

We also had a problem solving challenge involving some hippos and a board book that Mr. MacLellan reads to his six-month-old son. Ask your student how they did!

At home, you can use a deck of cards to play two games we have played in class:

Double Compare - divide the deck in half, pull the top two cards, add the values together, and compare with your opponent. The player with the greater value takes the cards, as long as they remember to say "___ is greater than ___". With a normal deck of cards, aces can be 1 and the face cards can be wild cards.

Highest 3 out of 6 - Each player starts with 6 cards in front of them. You need to make the highest three-digit number you can with digits on your cards. After both players make their highest three-digit number, they compare, just as they did in Double Compare. A normal deck of cards adds an extra element to the game, as 10s can push the numbers into the thousands!

You can also quiz your student on combinations to make 10 and adding 1, 10, and 100 to any three-digit number.

Social Studies

We talked about behaviors and actions we want to see in school, and are developing a list of rules to live by in second grade. These will be rules that apply to our behavior anywhere we are, in school and out. Once we settle on language and categories we agree on, we will sign our names to a classroom agreement.

Additionally, we discussed our hopes for the year, and ways that we want to grow as students.

Science

We are working on science skills, especially developing questions, making observations, discussing what we notice and wonder, and self-assessing the quality of our work.

Check out the video about our raisin experiment on our blog to see more!

We have a great year ahead of us!

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Observational drawing

Observation is an essential skill for successful science education. We develop this skill in Lab 204 by focusing on drawing what we notice. In our science drawings, we are careful, precise, exact, and specific. We draw exactly what we see, and include many details that we otherwise would have overlooked. Here, we are using our science observation notebooks to draw some of the plants in our room.

Dance Party!

Dance Party! from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

We conducted the first half of our first science experiment of the year! We wondered what would happen to raisins when we put them into bubbly water. Some of our colleagues predicted they would pop out of the water and fly through the air. Some predicted they would turn into grapes again! Some predicted they would float on the water.

To make this a good experiment, we conducted a fair test. We will be talking a lot about fair tests as the lab year goes on, but in a nutshell, a fair test involves a repeatable, specific procedure, so that all results are controlled for external variables and everyone's data can be compared. For this experiment, we decided to use the same quantity of water, the same containers, the same number of raisins (8), and to drop the raisins into the cup one at a time from the height of the rim of the cup.

Tomorrow, we will conduct a control test, with plain water, to see if the bubbles make the raisins act differently than they would in normal water. We also had other questions we were wondering about, such as: Will the raisins plump up into grapes eventually? Why do the raisins that float to the top then sink? How come some of the raisins never float?

The First Day of School

Our class had a fun and busy (and very hot!) first day of school. We made clay animals, sang "Down By the Bay," wrote about our summer vacations, used a magical tool, and learned what makes a happy marker. We read Kevin Henkes's Chrysanthemum, watching for the problem in the story, his use of interesting words, and how much he loves the number three.

A lot of the beginning of the year involves setting up a common base that we build off of for the rest of the year. We work on establishing a class culture, norms, and community. We develop rules and learn procedures and structures that keep our day flowing smoothly. We learn about each other and build relationships and trust. And we challenge everyone to do their best, setting high standards for everything from passing the door to the person behind you to writing narrative nonfiction. As Paula Denton and Roxann Kriete say in The First Six Weeks of School, "The first week is a time to help children see their school as a place where they belong and where they know and can meet expectations. They need to feel comfortable and supported, excited and challenged."

All of the teachers and staff at the Lowell School are looking forward to all of the learning and growing that lies ahead. We have a lot to do, and we are excited to do it!