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 ;-).