Friday, October 27th

 Happy Friday Weckie Parents!

It's hard to believe it's the end of October and we have kids wearing shorts today (talk about a win)!! We have been busy in 202 learning lots, growing lots and having lots of fun together along the way. Yesterday our Dublin PTA so generously thanked each child for their participation in Color Run fundraising with a sno-cone from the Kona Ice Truck!

Word Work/Phonics

We have been learning all about homophones in our word work. Think of words that sound the same but mean different things (such as: see and sea, here and hear, write and right, etc.). We looked at riddles that used homophones and talked about how to translate them and had a good laugh along the way. Then we spent some focused time on troublemaker homophones like: there, their and they're as well as: to, too and two. While these are still confusing for some, for others they were totally clicking and understanding the differences! We'll keep working on these alllll year long in 2nd grade! We made pictures in our SNAP word books to help us to remember the differences between these tricky words.

We also took some time to continue our work with vowel teams. So often we say when we see two vowels in a word (like 'ea' in 'sea' we take the sound of the first vowel and it's a long vowel sound. "When two vowels go walking, the first one does the talking". But then we took a look at a mentor text titled, "Evelyn Del Rey is Moving Away". We found several examples of vowel teams that fit this rule but then, we found several vowel teams in words that did not fit this rule (grouchy does not have a long 'o' sound, nor does pigeons have a long 'e' sound). We brainstormed ways readers could attack these words and try many different ways to say the word before figuring out what must be the right way to read the word.

Readers' Workshop

In Workshop we have been digging deep with character elements in stories and new vocabulary in stories. We have spent time answering the following questions about several different books. 

• Who were the main characters? Who were other characters?
• What is the setting of the story? Where does it take place?
• What was the problem in the story?
  
• What were the main events of the story?
  
• How was the problem resolved?

Readers' have had time to do this whole group, with partners and with our new reading groups that have launched last week! These are also questions you should be asking your readers' at home after finishing fiction books that you read with them.

We have also dug really deep with vocabulary in the books we are reading. New words like: particular, returned, appeared, patches, privacy, jaunty, amused, and furious have been words we have pulled from mentor texts to attempt to use in our own writing and have added them into our SNAP word books. 

Writers' Workshop

We continue our work with personal narratives in Writers' Workshop. Students are working on generating books about a time they did something. Boy have they had some cool adventures to share and given me lots of fun ideas to do with my own kids! There have been many eager kids to share their writing with the whole class up on the big screen and they have been rewarded with shamrocks for being so very brave!

Math Workshop

In Math Workshop we are working with all kinds of addition strategies! We have generated a chart in our math journals of strategies like: doubles, making combinations of ten, using helper facts of 10, using addition number stories and using the turn-around rule for addition. We dug deeper with the turn around rule for addition (saying that 4+5 is the same as 5+4) and then the students were challenged to explain if the turn-around rule works for subtraction? Ask them! Does it work? Is 21-3 the same as 3-21? Students had to prove why they thought it did/did not work and then were given time to revise their answers based on findings of other students. I love these type of math lessons (they are called Open Response days) as we spend two days on a topic and we learn so much, from each other!

Science

In science we have been working on our new plants unit! Our brassica are growing well in our mini-greenhouse and this week we even planted wheat seeds in straws ... without soil!! The kids are convinced they will not grow. We shall see ;-).

Friday, October 13th - Happy Color Run Day

 Today was a much anticipated day in our classroom and across the school! We had such a great time out at the Color Run this morning! There was so much excited energy. Laughter filled the track as kids screamed and ran through clouds of color! Thank you for signing your kids up on MyBooster, thank you for all of the incredible donations to our school and thank you to all of the volunteers who helped make this special day possible for our kids. Wow!

Readers' Workshop

In Readers' Workshop we are digging deeper with story elements and character details. We have taken time to learn about story elements in books during Language Workshop the last two weeks and Readers' Workshop. Books we have used have included: Chrysanthemum, Wolf, Goldisocks and the Three Libearians, and Wemberly Worried. We have talked about finding the main characters. We have talked about learning to pick out the setting of a story (where it takes place). And then we talked about how you retell the big events of a story orally or written, making sure to include the problem and the resolution! Next we dug deeper with our character traits and looked specifically at the character Chrysanthemum, and how she changed over the course of the story, as many characters do!

Writers' Workshop & Phonics

We have spent this week digging deeper with our personal narratives. We have spent time looking at feeling words so that we can describe the feelings in our narratives of our characters. We have tried stretching beyond words like happy, sad and mad for words like: ecstatic, excited, miserable, frustrated, terrified, etc. Then in Word Work this week we overlapped and spent time with "Trouble Maker" words we looked for to fix up in our writing AND talked about when to use capital letters, and looked for and fixed those up in our writing too! So many great narratives have been written!

Math Workshop

This week in Math we took our Unit 1 Assessment. These came home with the Weckies on Thursday and are for you to keep home, to celebrate and to help your children practice and learn from. We launched Unit 2 with a review of dollar values and a new game called, "Money Exchange". Homelinks began coming home this week as well. I try not to send them home on Fridays and some days math will take us two days, so there might not always be a Homelink every day we do math!

Scenes from the Money Exchange game this week.

Social Studies

This week we took our Unit 1 Assessment together. The new social studies program has a lot of "meat" to the lessons. We felt as a grade level that doing the assessment together was a great way to review the concepts taught in the first unit. We learned all about how life has changed over time and ways that you can study how life has changed. One way we learned about was speaking to a primary source. Thus, this is where the Quest comes in with needing to interview an adult (the older the better) about their life in 2nd grade which we will compare next week to our lives in 2nd grade.

Important Upcoming Dates/Info:

October 17th - Social Studies Quest Interview DUE

October 20th - Dublin Spirit Wear Day

October 26th - Buster the Bus safety assembly

October 27th - Trunk or Treat @ Dublin 6-7:30pm

October 31st - 1/2 Day of School, Halloween Party 11-12noon (You must be signed up as a volunteer to attend)