Happy 2020!! It's so great to be back with your kids and pick up right where we left off! We have had a super week back to school and it was so heartwarming to see how excited everyone was to see their friends on Monday AM when we returned!
Thank you to everyone who so generously donated headphones to our class!! We are in WONDERFUL shape now and greatly appreciate your generosity! We are NO longer in need of headphones and have had a lengthy discussion once more, reminding us how we use headphones and take care of them! To the Tiaga's, the Masen's, the Berney's and the Johnson's, we say: THANK YOU!!!!!!!
Writers' Workshop and Readers' Workshop:
In WW we are moving into a new part of our non-fiction writing unit where we transition from writing like scientists, to writing like experts on a topic! Information came home on Tuesday on a purple sheet about this non-fiction work. It would be great if you can spend some time with your child this weekend looking up information about your child's topic... any notes, printouts, books, magazines, etc. that you can gather and send in would be fantastic!! We will be looking at the Dublin library too and looking up research in the computer lab. Please make sure your child is not completing their project with you at home, just gathering materials and supplies.
In Writers' Workshop this week in prep of this project, we have spent time in both Readers' and Writers' zooming in on non-fiction text features. It's important for our writers' to understand the workings of non-fiction before writing their own book! Title, headings, table of contents, captions, photographs, maps, diagrams, cycles, glossaries, indices, etc. are all features we have been learning about this week and figuring out ways we can write like scientists. In Readers' Workshop we dug deeper to compare books that were on the same topic but one being fiction and one being non-fiction. We did a comparison and found lots of similarities and lots of differences. We had such great discussion on this topic and also introduced the informational fiction genre after questions arose about books like The Magic School Bus! While the books are filled with fictitious stories (like being swallowed into the human body) you sure can learn a ton of information from these books!
I am in the midst of reading testing right now and this round will hear from ALL readers. This does take time so please be patient that we have taken a break from reading groups. Kids in Reading Intervention Groups for iReady have continued to meet with Mrs. LeFurge and Mrs. Sitar or Mrs. Nixon. On average, these tests can take upwards of 30-45 minutes per child... with some taking less time, and many who have shown growth, taking much more time, one on one.
iReady testing will also resume next week in Reading and in Math. More info to come on this soon!
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| Comparing text sets between fiction and non-fiction books on the same topic! |
Math Workshop:
In Math we have been hitting three concepts heavy this week: time, measurement and money!! These are ALL concepts that EVERYONE can use extra practice with. I strongly encourage you to work with your children on the next many homelinks to help them fine tune their abilities to tell time, to measure to the nearest inch or centimeter, and then to count coins and be able to find equivalences (like 10 pennies = 1 dime) and being able to make change from $1.
We have been working hard with coins to "buy" imaginary items from a store - finding several ways to show how we could pay as well as finding ways to overpay and then get change back in return. This is a skill that can be tricky but is also very important to master in second grade. Please find time at home to spend it playing with coins with your child! Have them help pay for things at the store or at a restaurant! Anything we can do to help our kids with coins is huge. We have been playing different money games here as well and working with partners to practice this tricky skill.
A special thank you...
To the parents who helped make our Holiday Snowman Breakfast such a hit! The kids actually came back from break talking about how they wished we could do that MORE often ;-).
And a special thank you to the Dublin Student Council for giving each classroom funding to buy new Stem Tools, toys and games!! It was declared that it was like CHRISTMAS in here on Wednesday when we opened all of our new goodies. The Weckies helped make a giant wish list and we were able to get so many things from our list! Thank you Student Council!
Have a fantastic and safe weekend... looks like Mother Nature is going to play rough with our state!!
:-) Jen Weckstein
