The first few weeks of school

We have been hard at work in school so far! Here is a little video of clips Mr. MacLellan made this month.
September Snapshots from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.


Reader's Workshop
We have read a lot of books so far! We have been focusing on realistic fiction and other engaging narratives. We read a number of books about the first day of school, including School's First Day of School, by Adam Rex. This book takes the familiar concept of a character unsure about the first day, and flips it by telling the story from the perspective of a brand new school building! You should check this book out of the Watertown public library and take a look.

We also read a few authors to get some tips we can use in our own writing. We read Kevin Henkes, Mo Willems, Donald Crews, and Peter Brown, who can all teach us about how to write some spectacular, funny, thoughtful narratives.

We will soon be starting Fundations, and we have been thinking a lot about words, spelling patterns, sentence conventions, and how to talk about books. We read two poems, "Lunch" and "Coming to School," and put each into our poetry notebook. See if your student can recite either of these at home!

Writer's Workshop
We are writing personal narratives: true stories from our lives. We started with stories from the summer, and then thought about ways to make our stories interesting. We noticed that most books we read have a problem in them, and we developed a list of possible problems that happen to kids, things like getting hurt, having something bad happen, or getting lost. We read some books written by Mr. MacLellan's former students, including some amazing ones by Derek. We can learn about good writing by studying lots of authors, even kid authors!

Math
We are studying place value. Place value is one of the most amazing and useful math concepts ever developed, and students need a solid understanding of it to be successful in the rest of the year. So far, we have:
- worked on reading and writing numbers up to 1,000, using standard form, word form, and expanded form
- learned how to draw very large numbers quickly
- compared three-digit numbers with the >, <, and = signs
- put three-digit numbers in order from least to greatest and greatest to least

Comparing two 3-digit numbers, 1 from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

Comparing two 3-digit numbers, 2 from Stephen MacLellan on Vimeo.

Science
Scientists make careful observations of the world around them, and we practiced this skill by doing scientific illustrations. We looked at the notebooks of real scientists, thought about how they use drawing and writing to capture what they notice, and practiced on our own. We drew plants in our lab, leaves from around our building, and things we saw in the garden.

Next up, we will be focusing on materials.

Social Studies
We are working on building our classroom community! We have slowly developed a list of 4 rules for our class this year:
- Be safe
- Take care of the school
- Have fun, be kind, don't bully
- Try your best

To get to these four, we thought about behaviors we want to see in school, ideas we had for rules, and how to treat other people. We thought all of our rules should be about what to do, instead of what not to do. We also wondered if we needed to have any rules at all!

News and Other Information
If you want to place a Scholastic book order, I will be submitting the order in the morning on Friday, 9/29. You can easily place an order online, using our class code: LJLT8

Mrs. Phelan has a second grade parent coffee tomorrow morning, 9/29, from 8:30 to 9:30 in the cafeteria.