Camp Read S'More!

Greetings from Camp Read S'More!

The campers are all settled in for an afternoon of fun reading themed activities. Campsites have been set up and our readers are currently curled up reading good books! This afternoon's activities culminates our month long celebration of March is Reading Month! A big thank you to the many parents and grandparents who came to our classroom to read to us this month as Mystery Readers. (No, it is not too late to sign up - if you still want to come see us sometime and share a good book, please email Mrs. Weckstein and we will make it happen).

We have been busy lately in Second Grade so let me tell you all about it!

Math Workshop
Unit 6 Math Assessments have come home with your child today! To finish out our unit we reviewed all of the different strategies we have learned for solving story problems. For some, this is still a tricky concept - whether they need to add or subtract, to get the correct answer. Additionally in this unit we began to tackle two big concepts - Ballpark Estimates and Double Digit Addition (encompassing: Partial Sums for Addition and Re-grouping for Addition). You'll see on your child's latest math assessment how they are progressing with each of these skills. We spent many, many days holding off on teaching Everyday Math lessons to focus specifically on estimation and double digit addition. These are concepts we believe the kids should be far along with. If you find otherwise in your child's latest math assessment, please continue to work with them on this at home as the story problems and double digit addition will continue to be built upon in Unit 7.

Readers' Workshop
There have been lots of great things happening in Readers' Workshop as we have transitioned to a study of Non-Fiction literature. We have learned about various types of Non-Fiction literature structure while exploring all of the NF texts we have in the classroom. NF text structures include:

• Description
• Sequence and Order
• Compare and Contrast
• Cause and Effect
• Problem and Solution

We have incorporated many of these formats into our Guided Reading Group books as well. Thank you for sending the book bags back in a timely manner! There are many days when groups meet as planned and other days in our NF work where I may not pull groups only because then they will be missing out on NF work they need to do during the Independent or Partner Reading time of Workshop. Please know that I use my best judgment on those days. As you will read soon, our research time in Writers' Workshop has used time from Readers' Workshop, hence kids have not been easily available to also meet in Reading Groups.

Our mini-lessons have focused on the importance of glossaries, creating captions for photos without descriptions, reading two texts on the same topic and being able to compare/contrast new information and being able to generate questions from our reading to further our research in Writers' Workshop.

Writers' Workshop

In Writers' Workshop we have wrapped up our Opinion Writing Unit and have moved into an Informational Writing Unit. We have overlapped Readers' and Writers' Workshop as we have learned how to pull information from books and put them into a Question and Answer format type book. Students have chosen topics of their own interests to put into a Q and A text. We have spent a lot of time talking about good questions to ask and how to take information from texts and put it into our own words (so not to copy from books). Students have eagerly been drafting their own Q and A text - setting up a format with a table of contents, glossary, index and different headings for various pages. We even took some time to find some good photographs on Google to include in our texts. We will be wrapping these books up the week after break and then moving into a True and False NF text type format.

Science

In Science we are working our way through our Air and Weather Unit! We have been talking about weather types, the tools we use to measure weather and ways that air can be seen, felt and heard! More to come on this unit as we hope to dig deeper outside as the weather improves this Spring!

Word Study

In Word Study we have been tackling concepts that are difficult in second grade, but also so very important!! We spent a few days working on contractions - learning how to put two words together to make one new word. I have been encouraging the kids to use contractions more and more in their own writing as the best way to learn to use contractions is to use contractions! (For example: I am = I'm;  can not = can't, etc.) Next we moved onto the rule about: words that end with a short vowel followed by a consonant double the consonant and add "er" or "ed" to show comparisons or things that have happened in the past. (ex: jog = jogger or jog = jogged)

Important Dates and Reminders

Please remember that Report Cards for the second trimester are now available on Skyward. I will be contacting parents after Spring Break that have not yet viewed these cards to make sure everyone is able and aware. Please be sure to check these soon - lots of important information about your child!

Spring Break - No School Friday, March 30 - Friday, April 6. School Resumes on Monday, April 9, 2018

P.S. Sorry for no pictures this week - I'm blogging from one of the Student Laptops and unable to download pictures from my phone on this device. Be sure to check us out on Twitter for lots of fun 204 pics! Our username is: WeAreTheWeckies

Wednesday, March 14th

Happy March is Reading Month 204 Families!

We have kicked off March with a great deal of fun and learning all around books here at Dublin! We are already 7 mystery readers into March and are excited to welcome several more of you throughout the month! We celebrated Reading Night this past Tuesday night with several different guest readers, reading themed stations (crafts and games) as well as several contests and cool prizes. It was so fun to see so many of our families here this past Tuesday night to celebrate reading! The book fair also came to Dublin this week and we had fun browsing all of the new books from Scholastic. We had special visitors this past week from Project Newf all the way in Florida. If you haven't heard, Kermit and Fozzie Bear, two newfoundland dogs were found roaming the halls of Dublin this week and along with their owners, they taught us how they became children's book authors! We ended our week with a whole school Pajama Day and Read-In! For the last hour of the day, almost the whole school, teachers included, could be caught curled up reading a book!

Here are some pictures from our visit with Fozzie and Kermit, from Project Newf and their trainers/owners!

Readers' Workshop:
Readers' Workshop has transitioned in the last few weeks and you may have noticed the absence of guided reading books coming home. So what have we been up to? Book Clubs! Our students were separated into groups based on reading abilities and placed in student-led book club groups. Each group had the same book or books from the same series. Each day they were tasked with holding a group meeting discussion... following along with a plan of spending one day a week on: predictions, connections, wonderings, new vocabulary and comprehension. It was pretty neat to step back and watch the clubs in action while adding scaffolding and support as needed to different groupings.  As we move more now into non-fiction books, guided reading groups with books coming home will return and we will be spending our time in groups and in workshop focusing in on Non-Fiction Features and how these unique features in Non-Fiction texts can help us as readers to gather information and create mental files categorizing our new learning.

Please check your child's book bag for a yellow paper indicating their group number and the dates their group meets. It is imperative that they are bringing these books to and from school and spending time practicing their reading and then talking about what they are learning from the non-fiction texts. In order for our kids to best be prepared for third grade and beyond, reading time must be made daily at home just like it is made at school. Thank you for your help with this!

Partners have begun making lists of these features including: table of contents, index, glossary, bold print, captions, labels, how-to's, diagrams, photographs, illustrations, captions and more! By becoming experts at readers of Non-Fiction, we are better preparing ourselves to begin to write Non-Fiction in the coming weeks!

Writers' Workshop:
Our writers' are having a great time with our latest unit! We began by learning how to write letters but our letters also had a purpose as each letter written was either about a book or a book series that we were enjoying reading. We have learned how to incorporate all of the features of a friendly letter about a book including: title of book, author, illustrator, important events, opinions about the book, a rating scale, transition words to share information, greeting/closing, date and address. We have transitioned from writing letters about books to writing reviews about some of our favorite things: toys, restaurants and food! It has been awesome to conference with the kids and hear their passions about favorite toys, why they enjoy certain restaurants and what makes a food so wonderful (to them). They have been eager to share with the class at the end of a Writers' Workshop time and we have been eager to hear all that they have to say on various topics. Be sure to ask them about the toys, food and restaurants they have been writing about, and why!

Math Workshop:
We have been busy, busy, busy in math lately! We have been learning about story problems and how to use different diagrams to help us solve story problems that are either addition, subtraction or both. Next we have moved on to ballpark estimates and this has been a tricky topic for our students. I recently sent a remind text of the photo you'll see below featuring a chart we have been using daily in math. I have included this chart in my email as well so that you can use this at home to help your child practice and learn. We have taught double digit addition as well using base ten blocks and partial sums method. I promise, we will be learning how to "carry over" soon (as you and I learned), but we strongly believe that teaching alternative methods gives each and every child a strategy that best fits their style of learning and it is important that they are exposed to different strategies and thinking to build their number sense.

Additionally in Math we have added a new and very popular Math Station! Have you heard about Merge Cubes? If you haven't, and you have a smartphone, you should head to Walmart and get one, for $1!! The apps are free and are so neat!! It's a mix between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality - and we love them!!

Social Studies
In Social Studies we have just wrapped up our Geography Unit! In this unit we learned about maps, our local geography, and the different kinds of land forms we can find on maps and around the world! We especially enjoyed looking at local maps and spreading them out around the classroom. We talked about the map symbols and the importance of map keys. Our learners were excited and proud of the maps that they each created of White Lake, MI!

Science
Air and Weather is our next Science kit that has arrived! We have been focusing in on air first- how we know it exists, how we can see air in water, how we know air takes up space and looking at ways that we can move air. Soon we will shift to talk more about weather - the temperature on thermometers, how we measure rain in a rain gauge and how we measure wind-speed on an anemometer.

Important Dates/Reminders:
Thursday, March 15th - Half Day of School: Teacher PD in the afternoon
Friday, March 30- April 8th - Spring Break (Remember, no school on March 30 for Good Friday)

Please, please, please make sure to follow us on Twitter!!! Pictures and updates almost daily are posted from our classroom and show a lot more than we can on the Blog :-). Our Twitter Name is: WeAreTheWeckies