Hello Weckie Families! Thanks for checking out our classroom blog and reading about all of the great things happening in second grade. We sure have been busy these first 8 days of school! We have been tackling classroom routines, classroom expectations, routines for workshops and routines for lunch and recess! We have come a LONG way in the first 8 days and have also been having a ton of fun getting to know each other better. We have done a couple of mixer games and have a running game going right now called, "Two Truths and a Lie". We have had fun learning more about each other and guessing what the truths are verses what the lie was.
Thank you for sending your children each morning to school prepared to do their best! Please make sure that they always have: a snack, a water bottle and their purple folder every day. The office has not had "Emergency" snacks yet.
Phonics
We have just begun our first unit of Phonics titled, "Growing into Second Grade Phonics". Our first series of lessons took a look at phonics words and concepts your children worked with in first grade. We received the ideas that we called Phonics Professors Words including: capitals, syllables, consonants, vowels, word parts, short vowels, long vowels, blends, digraphs, silent e, vowel teams, r-controlled vowels and contractions. These are all concepts we will continue to dig deeper with in second grade. We used our own names to check for these different phonics professor words and were surprised by what we found! (I.E. r-controlled vowels, silent e, number of syllables, vowels/consonants, short vowels/long vowels and more! Today we began working to review the silent e and how typically in a word with cvc+silent e, the vowel is a long vowel. For example, think of the name Nate. It ends with a silent e, and the 'a' vowel is long in Nate (long vowels say their name). We will continue working with this combination of long vowels and the silent e next week.
We have very slowly launched our Readers' Workshop! We have built our reading stamina up to 15 minutes of focused, on task quiet independent reading time. I have enjoyed conferring with the kids listening to them read, hearing about their reading likes and dislikes and helping them to find a comfy spot to read around our room. We LOVED sharing our favorite books this week and found a lot of us enjoy the same book series or the same author! Thank you for sending these in to share :-).
Writers' Workshop
We have also slowly launched our Writers' Workshop! Writers' completed an On-Demand narrative piece last week where they were given time to write about a time they did something. A rubric will be used to score their writing and then guide my instruction through our narrative unit to help make us stronger writers! This week we launched that first personal narrative writing unit by brainstorming watermelons (big ideas) and seeds (events from the big idea). For example, my watermelon was our family trip to Atlanta this summer! My seeds were: The Georgia Aquarium, the Braves vs. Yankees baseball game and the Zoo Atlanta. Each one of those seeds will be a great small moment that I can write about later in the unit.
Math Workshop
In Math we have begun learning routines for whole group instruction! We will rotate math instruction this year where some days we will work whole group and other days we will work in small groups. The first unit of study lends nicely to the whole group as we set up routines for slate work, then a mini lesson (right now lots of reviewing first grade concepts), introduce new games and work on journal pages. As the year goes on, we'll move into a more small group format where kids will work at their just-right level through the math journal pages, games will be differentiated to match learners and small group instruction will be needs based. ("Number Line Squeeze" game pics below!)
Social Studies
This year in Walled Lake we have a brand new social studies program! The kids were super excited about their ginormous workbooks (literally excited, I promise) filled with colorful photos, activities, songs and more. We decided in second grade this year not to purchase Scholastic News magazines because the new curriculum looks a lot like Scholastic. Our first intro to the unit was all about families and how families from the past change to families today, but many of our traditions remain the same. We talked about different holidays that are important to our families and how our ancestors celebrated the same holidays similarly and differently.
Important Info:
Curriculum Night is Tuesday, September 12th at 6pm! Please meet in our classroom, Room 202 at 6pm. This is an adults only night.
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