The first week of school

Welcome to Second Grade! We have a fun and exciting year ahead of us, filled with growth, learning, and friendships.

The first weeks of school focus on getting to know each other, learning classroom routines, and developing our group dynamics. Grounding this work is our school's implementation of the Responsive Classroom approach.

Reader's Workshop
We read a lot of books this week! We loved School's First Day of School, All Are Welcome!, Chrysanthemum, and Clark the Shark. We also started our readers workshop, and began thinking of ourselves as big-time readers. Over the next month, we will build our independent reading stamina, going from less than 10 minutes now to over 45 minutes in the beginning of October. Second graders read a lot, and building this stamina is essential for all of the reading growth we will see this year.

We had a couple of reading lessons this week, learning about choosing just-right books with the 5 finger rule, how to have a discussion with a partner, what independent reading should look like, and how to have a class discussion about a book.

Writer's Workshop
We set our expectations for writing in second grade, because second graders write a lot. We only have thirty minutes of writer's workshop a day, so we have to make every minute count! Mr. MacLellan showed us the magic wands we will be using this year (that can make marks on paper, and then make them disappear!) This week, we were writing about things that happened over summer vacation.

Math
We started the year with a "Week of Inspirational Math," an idea from Jo Boaler's Youcubed initiative. Students worked together to solve challenging and expansive problems, ones with no set answers, that introduced us to the mindsets we need to have in math this year. We identified ways to sort emojis and shapes, played a game to find combinations of tens and ones, used Cuisinaire rods to explore equivalency, and found combinations of feet from different animals. We also watched a bunch of mindset videos about our incredible brains!

Social Studies
We are building our classroom community this week, learning about each other, our roles in the class, and our expectations for lunch and recess.

News and Other Information
Back to school night is Thursday, September 19th!