Tuesday, November 21, 2017

Wow, has this month flown by! There are a lot of great things happening in and out of our classroom that I have to share with you in this Blog Post. Where to begin?? First of all, I am sure you will agree with me, I was SO incredibly proud of our little musicians at their concert at Walled Lake Northern! Thank you to everyone who came. 

Below is a video of our performance at the event. The video is unlisted on Youtube so you cannot search for it - you have to have the link below to see our performance. I apologize for the quality - I am far from a professional!!

 Then continuing on our great month, our Twitter Account won a contest!! There was a contest put on by a twitter account that celebrates Children Picture Books. By retweeting their contest, we won several books by Ryan T. Higgins from the Mother Bruce series! The kids were so excited and we posted this message back. Shortly after we heard back from Ryan T. Higgins himself! If you are not following us on Twitter, please do! You can find us at username: @wearetheweckies - lots of great things are posted on our Twitter from this year you can also view.

Last but not least, last Friday afternoon we had a special BMX Bike Assembly as a celebration for the school for raising over $13,000 with our Fall Fundraiser (cookie dough and entertainment books). We got to watch this great show outdoors while learning about safety when biking, skateboarding or scootering!

Our very brave principal, Mr. Drewno, having a bike go right over him!

Readers' Workshop:
In Readers' Workshop there has been a lot of activity and change! I spent the first few weeks of the month doing reading assessments with several of our students. Many are making great growth already in their reading, writing and spelling... yay! I have reconfigured the groups and we will resume our meetings after the Thanksgiving Break. Thank you for your patience with this. The reading assessments are detailed and time consuming, yet so very valuable for us to continue instruction!  As many of you have seen, your child's iReady Reading Assessment information has come home and this provides us with even more data about what and how to instruct your child with as a reader.

In Workshop we have been busy!!! Each Friday students have the opportunity to log two books they have been reading from the week in their Book Logs. As readers' it is important to keep track of what we have read and to review the books we read. Then each reader has time to "Shop for new books" from our classroom library. Each child knows which leveled books in the classroom are just-right for them as well as how many they should collect for the following week. Additionally we have several hundreds of non-leveled books that the kids can select from as well. All of these books are in labeled baskets and we have been taking time learning how to properly return these books when we are done to the right basket.

Mini-Lessons in Readers' Workshop the past few weeks have included:

• I can use every bit of info that a book gives me, to help me figure out what words mean.
• I can read smoothly and when I hit a bump, I can reread for fluency.
• When I'm stuck and lose parts of the story, I can go back and retell the big parts of the story.
• I can predict and ask myself questions as I read the story.
• I can visualize the parts of a story as I read.
• I can find and collect new words from the books I read.
• I can infer to better understand the author's message.
• I can make connections to the story as I read.

Writers' Workshop:
We have a room full of young authors! You read that right! After studying in depth our Mentor Author, Kevin Henkes, we have been taking many of his writing craft styles and creating our own picture books. Mini-Lessons in Workshop have included:

• I can plan a story about a personified character with a problem.
• I can consider my audience and create an interesting lead for them.
• I can use the rule of three in my story.
• I can use quotation marks or a speech bubble to show dialogue in my story.
• I can use the "show don't tell" technique to interest my readers.
• I can use adjectives in my story to give details.
• I can end my story with closure.

We are now at the point where we are learning to edit and revise our stories! It has been fun in writing conferences to see what each child is writing about and capable of creating.

Word Study:
Many of the components addressed on the iReady Reading assessment are areas we focus on in Word Study. We have done lessons on the following topics:

• Prefixes and root words
• Syllables in words
• Vowels followed by 'r'
• The 'y' sound in words
• The 'ooh' and 'oo' sounds in words
• Past tense in words and adding 'ed' endings

Math Workshop:
In Math we just wrapped up our second unit of study! Many brought home their Unit 2 Assessments this week. Again, these documents have to be returned to school via district policies on testing. If your Unit 2 test did not come home and you would like to see it, please let me know and we can set up a time to meet or I can have it readily available at parent teacher conferences on December 14th. Thank you for understanding. Unit 3 tests will come home again for all with the hope that all are returned.

Lessons in Workshop have included:

• Adding doubles
• Combinations of ten (what numbers can you add together to make 10)
• Using double ten frames to represent numbers and how you can show the same number many different ways on a double tens frame.
• The Making 10 Strategy
• The Near Doubles Strategy
• The Turn Around Rule for Addition
• Recognizing Numbers on a Domino
• Odd and Even Patterns
• Even and Odd Addends
• Name Collection Boxes
• Frames and Arrows and their rules
• Fact Families for addition and subtraction

 Games have included:

• Fishing for 10 
• Two-Fisted Penny Addition 
• The Number Grid Game 
• Fact Triangles (addition and subtraction)
• Salute! 
• Name that Number 

Please remember also that on the back of your child's Everyday Folder is a card for access onto the Everyday Math Online account. If you go via the Dublin Homepage (it works best) under "For Students" you can find a link right to our class. You simply have your child input their information and you can click to play math games. These are many of the games we are using in class and a great way to reinforce and strengthen number sense. 

Lastly in Math, we have been working hard on two very challenging STEM projects! The dynamics behind the STEM project is that the students are having to work on a very challenging problem solving type activity, in a group. It has been eye opening to watch some students struggle with this - and to be honest - it has been really good for some of the kids to struggle because things are typically pretty easy for them! Groups have had to have patience, learn to be resilient when faced with a challenge, let everyone participate and listen to different ideas and viewpoints in the groups. Neither object has been completed yet, but we are close!

Science:
Science has definitely been a hot subject as of late! Our scientists are loving studying plants! We have all sorts of things growing in the room and each one has been planted and maintained all by the kids. You should have had a cup of grass and alfalfa come home this week. We finished up our discovery on grass and alfalfa (weeds) and wanted to make sure these came home before they dried up for the season!

Our primary focus has been on the Brassica plant. The Brassica is unique because it grows rapidly and demonstrates all of the plant parts we have been learning about (roots, stem, leaves, flower, bud, seed pod and seeds). Each child has grown a Brassica and many have successfully pollinated across themselves to then produce a seed pod. We will now stop watering our Brassica plants and let them dry out over the Thanksgiving holiday. The idea is that once they are dry, we can harvest the seeds from the pods and plant the new seeds to start the cycle once more!

These are our Brassica plants drying out so we can harvest the seeds.

Additionally as the unit is titled "New Plants" we have been taking clippings from plants and watching them grow into new plants. All of our clippings you all sent in are alive and well and new roots have grown off of the stems. Our scientists have been making observations in their science logs and have been carefully charting progress and growth! Additionally we are growing new plants from wheat seeds, garlic cloves and potatoes... stay tuned!

Social Studies:
Social Studies has been on the back burner lately while our Science Kit has been here! We have been learning about communities and this week spent time talking about the three different types of communities: urban (big city), suburban (us), rural (farming) and the different features and characteristics of each. We even talked about the pros and cons of living, working and playing in each community. Lastly the kids had to select if they could choose, which community they would live in, work in and play in of those three choices. It was fun to see what many said and why!

Important News and Reminders:

• Please sign up for Parent Teacher Conferences on December 14th. We have a shortened half day of school that day - a half day dismissing one hour earlier than a normal half day to make time for PTC. If you are needing help using Skyward to sign up, please contact the Dublin office ASAP.  
• No School - Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24th: Have a fantastic Thanksgiving Break. 

We all have so much to be thankful for - I am so thankful for your children and your support each and every day! Thank you for giving me the opportunity to work with the best kids in WLCSD. Happy Thanksgiving!  :-) Jen Weckstein

 

Happy Friday!

Happy Friday 204 Families!!

We have been super busy lately in Second Grade and just having the BEST time learning and growing together!! This group is pretty fabulous...maybe I'm bias but they truly have been doing a really great job as a class lately and I'm one proud teacher. Thanks to everyone who came out to Walled Lake Northern for the homecoming parade - we had a great time showing our Dublin School Spirit!

Now, there is lots of learning to tell you about, so let's get going!


Readers' Workshop:
In Workshop LOTS has been happening over the past few weeks. Learning goals have included:

Strategies to make us better readers:

• I can stop and re-read when something doesn't make sense.
• I can take care of my reading partnerships by using my listening skills.
• I can plan ways to read with my partner.
• I can talk with my partner about our reading.
• My partner and I can solve our own problems.
• I can use reading strategies to tackle unknown words
• I can use a book log to keep track of my reading and I can write thoughtful comments in my log about the books I have read.

Each day we have used these targets as our focus for instruction. Students have built up to about 25 minutes of independent reading stamina where I can count on all reader's to be "Wow" readers. With partners we are up to about 20 minutes of solid reading. What happens while the kids are reading?

Mrs. Weckstein has started our guided reading groups! Each child has a reading book bag in a bright color. The bag is where your child will need to keep their book, reading forms, group schedule and anything else work wise that might come home for reading. Please pay attention to the schedule indicating which days I will see your child. Please make sure that they are doing this reading with an adult, not simply on their own. Please be sure to sign the reading form once you have finished the reading task so that Mrs. Weckstein knows it has been completed.

Last week we launched our groups but our couple of days off this week has thrown our groups off schedule. I anticipate with Halloween early next week, groups will not be resumed until Wednesday. After that we should be able to be pretty consistently meeting on scheduled days. Thanks for being flexible with this!

Writer's Workshop

In Writer's Workshop we have just completed our Poetry Unit! We wrapped up the unit with a fun Halloween Poem for the hallway. The writers' in this unit have learned to do so much with poetry, it was fun to see them show this off in their Haunted House Poetry! Writers' have learned to use: alliteration, onomatopoeia, personification, show not tell, line breaks, repetition and more! Be sure to stop by the hallway and check out this last published piece of poetry.

Please look for a packet of poetry work to come home with your child in the next week or so. There will be a lot! Please take time to look through this packet with your child and celebrate all that they have created and learned to do. I know that they will be just as eager to share with you as they have been to share with me and their classmates here! In their packet you will also find a rubric of what your child should have learned to do in this unit, and should be demonstrated in their work. Feel free to use this to help encourage them to write poetry at home. With poetry having very few rules, it's a great writing style they can continue to use at home and at school this year.

Math Workshop

We have been learning all sorts of great things in math these past few weeks. We have been doing a ton with different strategies for addition: adding doubles, adding combinations of ten, using double tens frames to make ten, and using what we know from doubles to help do doubles plus one facts. You'll be sure to see lots of addition practice coming home in Math Journal pages, Homelinks, Exit Slips and practice sheets. Topics we have covered include:

• Turn Around Rule for Addition
• Even and Odd Numbers
• Doubles Facts
• Addition Number Stories

Then this week we did a challenging Open Response problem. Students are very comfortable with the Turn Around Rule for Addition (3 + 4 is the same as 4 + 3). Students were first asked to create their own Subtraction Number Story and then solve the problem with an illustration and a number model. On the flip side they were asked if the Turn Around Rule can apply to subtraction. They had to use the number model from their self-created problem to prove it works or does not work, and then explain this with words. Let me tell you, this was TOUGH!!! Lots of conversation, lots of time to share ideas with partners and then off they wen to work. The fun of the Open Response is that we spend two days grappling with a tricky problem like this. On Day Two the students got partnered up and had to share their work with their partner and discuss their findings. They were then given time with a colored pencil to modify their response based on any new info they gained from their partnership. It was VERY interesting to see what they came up with when we shared in the end of the lesson!

Science

We are having SO MUCH FUN being botanists!! We have been planting and planting and planting and planting!! Thank you so much to everyone who sent in plant clippings! We are eagerly watching them regrow roots and grow a new plant. In our science activities we have planted several things. Each botanist is currently growing a brassica plant. The brassica is awesome because it grows rapidly so we can see the life cycle pretty quickly. Students have been taking care of their plants with water and light daily. Next our scientists have planted grass and alfalfa sprouts. The scenario we are setting up is to make it look like a lawn - grass and weeds! More to come with what we will be doing there, however, the kids did love mowing their lawns this week as the grass is growing fast. Later this week we planted garlic bulbs in hopes to create another type of new plant. To be continued...

Social Studies

Our first unit in Social Studies is all about our community. We have spent time lately talking about the groups within our community and our roles in the community we play in different groups (i.e. church, soccer, dance, etc.) Next we moved on to talk about our families and the importance of our family in our community. Coming soon we will be learning about the different types of communities: urban, suburban and rural, and deciding which community we would want to live in if we could choose and why!

Important Info/Reminders:

-October 31st - Halloween Parties in the classroom at 10:45-11:45am. We have awesome parents who will be running our party. We ask if more parents want to come, that you offer to help in the classroom with the party as the more who help, the more we can do! Please remember to send your child with their costume to school this day - no weapons please.

-October 31st - Half Day of School

-November 7th - No School - Election Day

A few other fun shots... Main Moose, Reporter, Extra PBIS Recess...

Friday, October 6th

Hello Weckie Families!

Second Grade is AWESOME and definitely the place to BE! We have been so busy lately learning and having fun along the way. It's amazing what this group is already capable of doing only a month into school. This past week we had our first indoor recess. As a teacher, you worry what the classroom will look like after 20 minutes of playtime without me present... game pieces all over, construction paper scraps cut up on the floor, Lego's under tables, etc. In the staff lounge we even talked as a team wondering what we might come back to find. I can't speak for the other classrooms, but I can speak to ours. What did I come back to? The classroom was silent. The toys were picked up. The room looked like no one had been there except for there being 23 kids at their tables with smiles on their faces. Wow.  I was floored and so proud. This group is pretty fabulous in my book!

Reader's Workshop:
The past two weeks we have been zooming in on strategies that make us great readers! We spent time learning to use a bookmark so that as a reader we can stop in one place and then return to that place the next day to continue our reading. Sticky notes work wonderful for this neat trick. Then we talked about learning about reading from other people and shared our Reading Interviews! If you haven't had a chance to check out the post on the blog before this one, please do. The feedback we got on the interviews has all been compiled by us and shared with our families. Lots of great advice and favorite book titles. I loved hearing the kids share what it was like for their special person to learn to read and being able to connect my own journey to their journey! I struggled with hearing problems in Kindergarten and struggled to learn to read in first and second grade. Now? I love reading and would consider myself a strong reader. Lots of eyes bugged when they heard that - it just takes practice and the understanding that we all learn at a different pace. Earlier this week we set goals for our reading and used things we learned about in the interviews and from our own experiences. We will keep these reading goals for the first trimester. Be sure to ask your child what their reading goal is! Lastly we started recording these reading strategies into our Response Logs' in our Personal CAFE Menu (C- Comprehension, A - Accuracy, F - Fluency, E - Extended Vocabulary). Under the Comprehension category we added: Read the title of a new book and take a picture walk through the text before reading, Reread a book a second time to help hold tight to the meaning of the story. Both strategies are great ways to improve our understanding of a book.

This past week we also took the iReady Reading Assessment. Without getting into too much detail here, the state of Michigan has now created a 3rd Grade Reading Retention Bill. The first graders at Dublin will be a part of this new legislature but we are being required to use the data tracking now and it's going to be awesome! In the next week or so I will be sending home information on your child's progress on this assessment tool. It's important to remember this is only one of several tools we will use to diagnose and instruct in reading this year. The info coming home will present you with information on your child's strengths and weaknesses while also making suggestions for what you can do at home to further help your child. Like I said, more to come!

Language Workshop
In Language Workshop we are learning about the author Kevin Henkes. He is our Author Mentor for our upcoming Unit 2 in Writer's Workshop and what better way than to read all of his books now to familiarize ourselves with his style. We have spent the week digging deeper with his book: Lily and the Purple Plastic Purse. This book has so many lessons the kids can learn from as well as awesome vocabulary. We spent time doing a Visible Thinking Routine where you step inside a person and analyze the story from their side. While the story is told from Lily's perspective, we analyzed the story from Mr. Slinger's perspective, her teacher. It was cool to step into his shoes and connect this story to events and expectations in our own classroom. Be sure to ask your child more about this! This week we added two more words to our picture dictionaries: jaunty and unique.


Writers' Workshop
In Writer's Workshop our work on Poetry has continued nicely! Mini-Lessons have focused on:

• I can attempt line breaks with one of my finished poems.
• I can use white space in selected areas of my poem.
• I can use beautiful language in my poetry.
• I can show instead of tell in my poetry.
• I can use repetition in my poetry.

During Writers' Workshop I spend my time circulating around the tables working with individual students on this launching unit. It has been fun to see the unique writing styles in our classroom and to see some who are truly passionate writers amongst the bunch! We spend the last ten minutes of Writers' Workshop sharing out 2-4 poems of students who have spent time in conferences with me. It's great to see them excited to show their friends all that they have worked so hard for during writing time.

Math Workshop

We are just wrapping up our first unit of math in Second Grade :-). Concepts we have covered included:

• Equivalent names for numbers (ex: 10 can be: 1 dime, 10 tallies, 5 +5, etc.)
• Making 10 (games played included: Fishing for 100s, Turning Over 10, Penny Plate Addition
• Quarters and Introducing Math Boxes
• Even and Odd Numbers and Patterns
• Skip Counting Patterns 
• Comparing Numbers (<, > and =)
• Explorations (building with base ten blocks)

On Monday we will take our first Unit 1 Math Assessment. Students have been working hard with these reviewed concepts from First Grade. Be sure to look for math pages coming home in Friday packets. Many can stay home but some may ask you to fix something and then send them back to school corrected. Please make sure that an adult helps when a child is asked to re-do something from school. Thank You :-).

Social Studies

We have also launched our first Social Studies Unit this week... Our Community. We read the book On the Town  and talked about what makes up a community and all of the places in our community. These kids were super knowledgeable with places around our community and even helped us develop a definition for what makes up a community! More to come with this fun unit...

Important Dates/Reminders:

Sidebar from Mrs. W. This week there has been LOTS of discussion about the PTA Boo Bash and our plans for Halloween at Dublin. Our PTA along with Mr. Drewno have been working incredibly hard to plan a new event, The Boo Bash, on Friday, October 27th at Clifford Smart Middle School. As much as we love holding functions at Dublin, our school is not equipped to handle 600 kids and their families - it's not practical in an elementary school built like ours (Did you come to the Sock Hop last year? It was CROWDED). That being said, CHS is a great location for the first year of the event because it has a large cafeteria and open space for a HUGE turnout! The Weckstein's will be in attendance in costume and hope we will see all of you there too. We know it's a busy weekend for many of you (our guy turns 4 on Halloween and we'll have family in town that weekend, two birthday parties, soccer and a Halloween 5k), but we are excited to come out and support the PTA. Additionally the PTA needs help from each grade level. Please check out the Sign-Up Genius below to see how you might be able to help out with the event. 

http://www.signupgenius.com/go/5080f4aa8ad2e5-2ndgrade

Additionally, now we will proceed with our Classroom Party Planning. I will be in touch on Monday with the five parents who have signed up to help with our party - THANK YOU!! :-) If you did not sign up at Curriculum Night but are interested, please email me ASAP at JenniferPhillips@wlcsd.org.   Our party will run on October 31 from 11am-12pm. We do ask that if you are attending the party, you are there to help the kids. We need parent support and help on this day - it's crowded, kids are in costumes and they are hyper! Please come to help work the party if you plan to be there :-).

Thank you so much for your support! Have a fabulous weekend... and don't forget to watch the big game! :-)

Spirit Day was in full effect ... feeling in the minority!!