Hello Weckie Fams and a big HAPPY NEW YEAR from me!
It has been a great week back here, even if it has only been three days! We have gotten right back in the saddle and are off doing great things. I wanted to extend a huge thank you to all who sent in donations for our winter party, our parents who helped work the party: Monica Anglin, Cassandra Vasquez, Cathy Ivan, Kayla Tiller, Bridget Young and Kelly Jacek AND our two awesome party planners, Monica Anglin and Renee Gamble! We had a blast!!
Readers' Workshop
In Readers' Workshop we have moved onto a unit called: Bigger Books Mean Amping Up Reading Power. Our first bend in the unit helps us to practice making our reading more fluent. Mini lessons have included: rereading aloud and in our head to practice sounding fluent and scooping up words into larger phrases, so we read like we sing, smooth! We have been using Arnold Lobel's "Frog and Toad All Year" as our mentor text to practice reading with fluency. Guided Reading groups have resumed work as well with just-right books in the classroom.
Phonics
In Phonics we are continuing our work from before break with homophones. Homophones are words that sound the same, tend to be spelled different and mean different things. Examples include: meet/meat, pair/pear, board/bored. We spent a couple of days playing with silly homophones in rhymes and jokes before moving on to trouble maker homophones like: to, too and two. Next week we will tackle: there, their and they're plus your and you're.
Writers' Workshop
In Writers' Workshop we are working on expert books! Each child was asked to think of a topic that they consider themselves an expert on and then create their own non-fiction book! We have books about: dogs, video game consoles, tigers, polar bears, bunnies and LEGO just to name a few that have already been placed in our non-fiction book basket! We have spent time this week talking about our audience and making sure our writing is easy to read as well as exciting and engaging for our readers.
Math Workshop
In Math we are doing a lot of work right now with place value and using base-ten blocks. We have been reviewing place value in terms of: ones, tens, hundreds and thousands. We have used base-ten blocks to represent numbers with actual blocks and base-ten shorthand (written form). We have even started talking about trades when we can exchange 10 cubes for a long (equals 10) or how we can break down a long into 10 cubes to borrow. You can see where we are heading with this in terms of double digit addition and subtraction. We learned a new game called "Target" this week where we targeted the number 50 and 100 in making them with base-ten blocks. Last we ended the week beginning to look at measurement using the foot! You can see pics below from the math game and our measurement with a real (foot long) foot!
Upcoming Important Dates
No school - January 16 and January 17**
Scholastic Book Order Due: January 18th
Dublin PTA Bingo Night - January 20th at Dublin @ 6:30pm - Info sheet coming home today!
100th Day in 2nd Grade - TENTATIVE: Friday, February 10th (You'll want to start thinking about this day soon as we ask you to transform your 2nd grader into an adorable, 100 year old senior citizen. More info will come home in the coming weeks, but a head's up on this special day can also be super helpful in the planning purposes!)
