Monday, April 23, 2018

Hello Weckie Parents!

Happy Monday and thank you for taking the time to read our classroom Blog :-). We have been busy, busy in Second Grade and it's actually kind of wild to stop and think about how fast our time is winding down. When you come back from Spring Break, and look at your second graders and feel like they look more like third graders, you know the time is coming... yikes!!

Readers' Workshop & Writers' Workshop

We are continuing to move along in our study of Non-Fiction texts in both Readers' and Writers' Workshop! Students have been crafting their own non-fiction books based on research they have been doing during Readers' Workshop. We have spent a great deal of time learning to pull information from texts and transfer the info to stickie notes in our own words. Then we have taken those stickie notes and transferred our facts into a text format. First we spent about 2.5 weeks writing "Question and Answer" style books where each child wrote on their own topic using classroom non-fiction texts and Internet based research on our ChromeBook Laptops. Then we moved into a 2 week study of "True and False" style texts as an alternative way to present non-fiction information. We applied skills from the Q and A books to our writing and presentation of the True and False books. Be sure to ask your child to tell you more about these projects- the have been so excited about writing lately and currently have their published books on display in our classroom for their classmates to read during Readers' Workshop Independent and Partner times!

Math Workshop

We have been learning all sorts of things in Math Workshop. We have been working with addition involving three numbers - strategies for solving these types of problems using partial sums or friendly numbers, as well as playing games like Basketball Addition to reinforce the concept and offer additional practice.


Next we moved into a whole weeks worth of lessons on Measurement. Students are familiar with the US Standard Measurement (inch, foot and yard) as well as the Metric System (centimeters and meters). They have been working with: rulers, tape measures, meter sticks/yard sticks to measure all sorts of distances and lengths in our classroom and on our bodies. Students have used a lot of estimation and predicting before doing real measurements. Table lengths, the door way measurement, length of our classroom, standing long jumps, arm spans, distances around our heads, lengths of our legs and more, have all been measured. Data has been collected and we have practiced making line plots and pictographs of this data. 

That time we measured the room using the kids!

We also began to take time to review 2-dimensional shapes (rectangles, triangles, squares, rhombus, parallelograms and quadrilaterals) have all been explored. We will be digging deeper with these shapes as well as 3-dimensional  in the weeks ahead!

Language Workshop

In Language Workshop we have been exploring with two books, one about the life of Beatrix Potter (author of Peter Rabbit) and one about the life of a humpback whale named: Ibis. Each text has been unique as the story has appeared to look like fiction, yet was filled with true facts about the main character - Beatrix and Ibis. While our students are confident about what makes a book fiction and what makes a book non-fiction, it is always fun to stump them too, when a book appears to be a little bit of both. We took our wonderings from Language Workshop and sorted the books we had in our book tubs this week based on if they were: fiction, non-fiction or a little bit of both. We did a visable thinking activity with Ibis to dig deeper and talk about what might be fiction and what might be based on fact throughout the text. This was difficult yet, we had an awesome discussion about our thoughts and why as we pulled evidence from the text and our own prior knowledge. As this week has ended we attempted to name this genre of book and came to the conclusion that Informational Fiction fit perfect (and yes, that's the real name of this genre).

Science 
Our Scientists continue to be busy exploring AIR! We have had some awesome weather lately - perfect for: collecting air with pinwheels and snake spinners, blowing bubbles and monitoring the windspeed, learning about different types of clouds, launching balloon rockets and creating our own parachutes! 

Important Dates/Reminders

Monday, April 23 - ALL FIELD TRIP Money and Permission slips DUE for Troy Historical Society trip on Wednesday, May 2nd. 

Friday, April 27 -  Half Day of School - Teacher PD in the afternoon

Thursday, May 17 - School Wide Spring Clean-Up

Friday, May 18 - Field Day

Camp Read S'More!

Greetings from Camp Read S'More!

The campers are all settled in for an afternoon of fun reading themed activities. Campsites have been set up and our readers are currently curled up reading good books! This afternoon's activities culminates our month long celebration of March is Reading Month! A big thank you to the many parents and grandparents who came to our classroom to read to us this month as Mystery Readers. (No, it is not too late to sign up - if you still want to come see us sometime and share a good book, please email Mrs. Weckstein and we will make it happen).

We have been busy lately in Second Grade so let me tell you all about it!

Math Workshop
Unit 6 Math Assessments have come home with your child today! To finish out our unit we reviewed all of the different strategies we have learned for solving story problems. For some, this is still a tricky concept - whether they need to add or subtract, to get the correct answer. Additionally in this unit we began to tackle two big concepts - Ballpark Estimates and Double Digit Addition (encompassing: Partial Sums for Addition and Re-grouping for Addition). You'll see on your child's latest math assessment how they are progressing with each of these skills. We spent many, many days holding off on teaching Everyday Math lessons to focus specifically on estimation and double digit addition. These are concepts we believe the kids should be far along with. If you find otherwise in your child's latest math assessment, please continue to work with them on this at home as the story problems and double digit addition will continue to be built upon in Unit 7.

Readers' Workshop
There have been lots of great things happening in Readers' Workshop as we have transitioned to a study of Non-Fiction literature. We have learned about various types of Non-Fiction literature structure while exploring all of the NF texts we have in the classroom. NF text structures include:

• Description
• Sequence and Order
• Compare and Contrast
• Cause and Effect
• Problem and Solution

We have incorporated many of these formats into our Guided Reading Group books as well. Thank you for sending the book bags back in a timely manner! There are many days when groups meet as planned and other days in our NF work where I may not pull groups only because then they will be missing out on NF work they need to do during the Independent or Partner Reading time of Workshop. Please know that I use my best judgment on those days. As you will read soon, our research time in Writers' Workshop has used time from Readers' Workshop, hence kids have not been easily available to also meet in Reading Groups.

Our mini-lessons have focused on the importance of glossaries, creating captions for photos without descriptions, reading two texts on the same topic and being able to compare/contrast new information and being able to generate questions from our reading to further our research in Writers' Workshop.

Writers' Workshop

In Writers' Workshop we have wrapped up our Opinion Writing Unit and have moved into an Informational Writing Unit. We have overlapped Readers' and Writers' Workshop as we have learned how to pull information from books and put them into a Question and Answer format type book. Students have chosen topics of their own interests to put into a Q and A text. We have spent a lot of time talking about good questions to ask and how to take information from texts and put it into our own words (so not to copy from books). Students have eagerly been drafting their own Q and A text - setting up a format with a table of contents, glossary, index and different headings for various pages. We even took some time to find some good photographs on Google to include in our texts. We will be wrapping these books up the week after break and then moving into a True and False NF text type format.

Science

In Science we are working our way through our Air and Weather Unit! We have been talking about weather types, the tools we use to measure weather and ways that air can be seen, felt and heard! More to come on this unit as we hope to dig deeper outside as the weather improves this Spring!

Word Study

In Word Study we have been tackling concepts that are difficult in second grade, but also so very important!! We spent a few days working on contractions - learning how to put two words together to make one new word. I have been encouraging the kids to use contractions more and more in their own writing as the best way to learn to use contractions is to use contractions! (For example: I am = I'm;  can not = can't, etc.) Next we moved onto the rule about: words that end with a short vowel followed by a consonant double the consonant and add "er" or "ed" to show comparisons or things that have happened in the past. (ex: jog = jogger or jog = jogged)

Important Dates and Reminders

Please remember that Report Cards for the second trimester are now available on Skyward. I will be contacting parents after Spring Break that have not yet viewed these cards to make sure everyone is able and aware. Please be sure to check these soon - lots of important information about your child!

Spring Break - No School Friday, March 30 - Friday, April 6. School Resumes on Monday, April 9, 2018

P.S. Sorry for no pictures this week - I'm blogging from one of the Student Laptops and unable to download pictures from my phone on this device. Be sure to check us out on Twitter for lots of fun 204 pics! Our username is: WeAreTheWeckies

Wednesday, March 14th

Happy March is Reading Month 204 Families!

We have kicked off March with a great deal of fun and learning all around books here at Dublin! We are already 7 mystery readers into March and are excited to welcome several more of you throughout the month! We celebrated Reading Night this past Tuesday night with several different guest readers, reading themed stations (crafts and games) as well as several contests and cool prizes. It was so fun to see so many of our families here this past Tuesday night to celebrate reading! The book fair also came to Dublin this week and we had fun browsing all of the new books from Scholastic. We had special visitors this past week from Project Newf all the way in Florida. If you haven't heard, Kermit and Fozzie Bear, two newfoundland dogs were found roaming the halls of Dublin this week and along with their owners, they taught us how they became children's book authors! We ended our week with a whole school Pajama Day and Read-In! For the last hour of the day, almost the whole school, teachers included, could be caught curled up reading a book!

Here are some pictures from our visit with Fozzie and Kermit, from Project Newf and their trainers/owners!

Readers' Workshop:
Readers' Workshop has transitioned in the last few weeks and you may have noticed the absence of guided reading books coming home. So what have we been up to? Book Clubs! Our students were separated into groups based on reading abilities and placed in student-led book club groups. Each group had the same book or books from the same series. Each day they were tasked with holding a group meeting discussion... following along with a plan of spending one day a week on: predictions, connections, wonderings, new vocabulary and comprehension. It was pretty neat to step back and watch the clubs in action while adding scaffolding and support as needed to different groupings.  As we move more now into non-fiction books, guided reading groups with books coming home will return and we will be spending our time in groups and in workshop focusing in on Non-Fiction Features and how these unique features in Non-Fiction texts can help us as readers to gather information and create mental files categorizing our new learning.

Please check your child's book bag for a yellow paper indicating their group number and the dates their group meets. It is imperative that they are bringing these books to and from school and spending time practicing their reading and then talking about what they are learning from the non-fiction texts. In order for our kids to best be prepared for third grade and beyond, reading time must be made daily at home just like it is made at school. Thank you for your help with this!

Partners have begun making lists of these features including: table of contents, index, glossary, bold print, captions, labels, how-to's, diagrams, photographs, illustrations, captions and more! By becoming experts at readers of Non-Fiction, we are better preparing ourselves to begin to write Non-Fiction in the coming weeks!

Writers' Workshop:
Our writers' are having a great time with our latest unit! We began by learning how to write letters but our letters also had a purpose as each letter written was either about a book or a book series that we were enjoying reading. We have learned how to incorporate all of the features of a friendly letter about a book including: title of book, author, illustrator, important events, opinions about the book, a rating scale, transition words to share information, greeting/closing, date and address. We have transitioned from writing letters about books to writing reviews about some of our favorite things: toys, restaurants and food! It has been awesome to conference with the kids and hear their passions about favorite toys, why they enjoy certain restaurants and what makes a food so wonderful (to them). They have been eager to share with the class at the end of a Writers' Workshop time and we have been eager to hear all that they have to say on various topics. Be sure to ask them about the toys, food and restaurants they have been writing about, and why!

Math Workshop:
We have been busy, busy, busy in math lately! We have been learning about story problems and how to use different diagrams to help us solve story problems that are either addition, subtraction or both. Next we have moved on to ballpark estimates and this has been a tricky topic for our students. I recently sent a remind text of the photo you'll see below featuring a chart we have been using daily in math. I have included this chart in my email as well so that you can use this at home to help your child practice and learn. We have taught double digit addition as well using base ten blocks and partial sums method. I promise, we will be learning how to "carry over" soon (as you and I learned), but we strongly believe that teaching alternative methods gives each and every child a strategy that best fits their style of learning and it is important that they are exposed to different strategies and thinking to build their number sense.

Additionally in Math we have added a new and very popular Math Station! Have you heard about Merge Cubes? If you haven't, and you have a smartphone, you should head to Walmart and get one, for $1!! The apps are free and are so neat!! It's a mix between Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality - and we love them!!

Social Studies
In Social Studies we have just wrapped up our Geography Unit! In this unit we learned about maps, our local geography, and the different kinds of land forms we can find on maps and around the world! We especially enjoyed looking at local maps and spreading them out around the classroom. We talked about the map symbols and the importance of map keys. Our learners were excited and proud of the maps that they each created of White Lake, MI!

Science
Air and Weather is our next Science kit that has arrived! We have been focusing in on air first- how we know it exists, how we can see air in water, how we know air takes up space and looking at ways that we can move air. Soon we will shift to talk more about weather - the temperature on thermometers, how we measure rain in a rain gauge and how we measure wind-speed on an anemometer.

Important Dates/Reminders:
Thursday, March 15th - Half Day of School: Teacher PD in the afternoon
Friday, March 30- April 8th - Spring Break (Remember, no school on March 30 for Good Friday)

Please, please, please make sure to follow us on Twitter!!! Pictures and updates almost daily are posted from our classroom and show a lot more than we can on the Blog :-). Our Twitter Name is: WeAreTheWeckies

 

Friday, January 26th

Hello Weckie Families!!

What a great two weeks we have had in second grade! Thank you so much to everyone who came out for Parent-Teacher Conferences. I thoroughly enjoyed having time to talk with you about your child and their growth in second grade. It is important that our kids are seeing us working together as a team to help them have their best year yet!

Yesterday we went on our first field trip and had a wonderful time at the Walled Lake Schools Outdoor Education Center! Our students attended four different classes while we were there. They learned about different types of weather and severe weather, they learned about seeds and how plants store seeds after going on a hike in the fields, they learned about how animals hibernate and built hibernation shelters and then lastly they learned about the importance of the different parts of mammals. A special thank you to Olivia's Mom and Nolan's Dad for helping chaperone our field trip! Here are just a few pictures from our adventures yesterday:

Readers' Workshop:
We are in the midst of a great new unit in Workshop! We have been zooming in now on the series books that we have in our classroom. The great thing about series books is just how predictable they are for a reader about the main characters. We have several book series in our classroom, and the kids' counted over 40 different series ranging in all levels for all readers. We have been making predictions based on prior knowledge about series characters and recording character traits to share with partners about our findings.

In reading groups we have just launched all new groups... yay!  Each child should have a reading group schedule in their book bag. Depending on need/level, groups will meet 1-3 times a week. Please make sure your child's book bag is here on their given dates. I realize there are days when I may be out unexpectedly or we have things come up, like a field trip, and I'll do my best to meet with those groups promptly upon  return which can throw the schedule slightly off.

Writers' Workshop:
We continue to dig deeper with our study of letter writing in second grade! Students have been taking information from Readers' Workshop about series characters and series books to write letters of recommendation to family, friends and Dublin teachers. We have been focusing in on the parts that make a good letter: address of origin, date, greeting, body of the letter including indentations for paragraphs, three facts, three opinions, closing greeting and our name. Students have then been meeting with a Writing partner to check over their writing: looking to add more details, add punctuation or capital letters, check and revise spelling, etc. It has been fun for our class to write letters to teachers at Dublin and their classrooms. We have communicated with Mrs. Doyle's third grade class and Mrs. Nichols' fourth grade classrooms so far.

Language Workshop:
We are in the midst of an awesome study of the Otis series in Language Workshop. Loren Long's Otis features a strong character who is brave, kind and a team player. Throughout the books we have read so far, we have found Otis to be all of those characteristics and more. This week we focused on Otis and the Tornado, but we have also read Otis and An Otis Christmas. We have zoomed in on good vocabulary in the texts, made predictions based on our prior evidence and used the text to support this as well as did a close reading activity where we had to zoom in on different pages that show different character traits Otis exhibits and provide evidence from the text. Be sure to ask your child about Otis as he is a pretty fabulous role model. Funny enough, in case you didn't know, Otis is also a tractor.

Math Workshop:
Last week we took our Unit 4 Math Assessment. Many students showed lots of growth with the unit four concepts. Time is definitely a tricky concept for second graders but a valuable one to master as well! We also noticed that work with base ten blocks was tricky prior to the assessment and on the assessment as well. Thank you to everyone who has already sent their Unit 4 test back signed. Please make sure if you have not, that you do so ASAP.

Money, money, money... MONEY! Here it comes! It's time to learn about money! We have just begun our fourth unit in math and this unit focuses heavily on coins, dollars and making change.  We began the unit with a fun game called "Beat the Calculator" and then moved on into our work with coins. Students are given a practical situation of a fruit and vegetable market and have to use this store to make purchases using coins to pay for their items. Next week we will dig deeper and use our coins to learn how to make change when paying for something. If you can at home, please reinforce coin concepts with your child. Having your child help pay for items out can help as well! They need lots of practice to make this skill more fluent.

Last but not least this week, we made measurement monsters! That's right, measurement monsters! Each child was given construction paper, glue and scissors and asked to create a monster with eyes, legs, feet and a body. They then had to measure several of the different parts of their monster body in inches.

Social Studies:
We are well on our way in our mapping unit in Social Studies. This week we created our own maps of White Lake and talked about how one goes about doing this and what the important features are to include on every map we make: title, key, main roads, major bodies of water, schools, parks and any other landforms. Next we talked about transportation in our community and the importance of transportation for moving goods, people and things in and out of our community and into other communities. Next week we will be learning about landforms in social studies.

Important Dates/Information:

• Friday, February 9th: 1/2 day of school - Professional Development for teachers. Students will be dismissed around noon.
• Wednesday, February 14th: Valentines' Day Party (more info to come soon). A note already came home asking for a gallon jug (cleaned and cut) as well as a list of all in our class for names on Valentines.
• Friday, February 16th: 1/2 day of school - Students will be dismissed around noon. Then we remain out of school for mid-winter break until Thursday, February 22nd when school resumes.

Happy 2018!

Hello Weckie Parents and Happy 2018!

We are excited to be back in school and continuing to learn and grow as a team! We have been pretty busy these first few days back in January and are excited to tell you all about it!

Prior to break we had an awesome ALL Second Grade Holiday Party. Thank you to all of the parent volunteers for your donations and time on the day of the event. We had so much fun celebrating with all of the second graders at Dublin.

All of our Gift of Reading books.. Excellent!

Sing Along Fun :-)

Party Activities

Nice catch!

Delicious treats

And fun crafts

Also before break two of our guided reading groups put on a little Readers' Theater Play for the students in our classroom, "Sleeping Beauty". Below you can click to watch the video of their performance. Please make sure you are following our classroom page on Twitter @WeAreTheWeckies so you can see performances like this, photographs and more news out of our classroom. Please click on the link below!

Readers' Theater 204 Presents:


This past week we also filled our Big Catch!!! Wahoo!!! In our classroom we have a board called "The Big Catch" and it holds several stuffed animal fish. Whenever we receive a compliment from another teacher OR do something spectacular in the room without being asked to, we earn a fish. It's been fun to challenge the Weckies to do their best and earn these fish. They are very excited about our class party Friday afternoon.

Readers' Workshop:
Lots has been happening in Workshop daily!! We have moved into a new unit where we are learning about facts and opinions in our reading. Students have been reading familiar mentor texts like Otis by Loren Long and The Bad Seed by Jory John. We have spent time picking through the books pulling out facts (and evidence that proves them true) and then formulating our opinions about the characters and stories based on our prior knowledge. We have talked a great deal about accepting other opinions even if they differ with your opinion and the saying: We can agree to disagree.  Readers' had time later this past week to take their own just-right books and pick out one character. They've been given the task of finding character traits (facts) about their character and then time to create their opinion of their character and story. It has been fun to hear what they have to say opinion wise!

Additionally in Workshop there has been a TON of testing going on!! On average, our DRA (Developmental Reading Assessment) takes 20-30 minutes per child with the length of time increasing one-on-one if they are independent at a level and need further testing. As a result, Guided Reading Groups have been temporarily on hold. I plan to wrap up testing Friday this week and you can look for new groups to resume next Tuesday! We will be sharing our findings and data at Parent Teacher Conferences for reading progress and growth.  I have been so PROUD of all that our students' have been learning to do and show in their reading.

In the room the testing has several implications... Partners are switched up for Partner Reading, Reading Groups are shuffling and students are learning to shop for new just-right books in different locations in the classroom library. This makes for a lot of excitement and a lot of review of our Readers' Workshop expectations and procedures for independent and partner reading time. 

Please make sure that your child is reading nightly at home regardless of when books come home. It is imperative that our kids are being exposed both at school and at home to quality reading materials.

Writers' Workshop
In Writers' Workshop we have connected our new writing unit to our new reading unit! Students are learning how to write friendly letters that contain information about books that they are reading - both facts and opinions. We have said our letters sound like movie previews as they tell someone a little bit about the story but leave the ending for the person to find out on their own. We have been talking about all of the components that make a friendly letter good quality including: date, address, greeting, body of letter, 2-3 facts and 2-3 opinions, questions, closer and signature. We actually wrote our first letter about The Bad Seed book and sent it to Mrs. Doyle in third grade. Her students were so excited to get mail and to read our book! They replied with a letter about the book, My Teacher is a Monster and loaned us their copy of their book.  We are finding that letter writing can be a fun and motivational way to get kids to write more about their reading in second grade!

Math Workshop
We have just completed our math work in Unit Four this week! In this unit we have:

• practiced telling time on clocks (hour, minute, to the closest five minute)
• learned about A.M. and P.M. and talked about which activities in our day are morning, afternoon and evening type activities
• worked with base-ten blocks to explore place value (ones, tens, hundreds)
• learned to break (decompose) numbers apart (654 is 600 + 50 + 4)
• worked with base-ten blocks to make exchanges in addition 
• learned to measure using both metric and the U.S. Standard forms of measurement (specifically: centimeters, inches and feet)

Measuring with a real foot ;-)

Exchange Game with base-ten blocks

Thank you for continuing to return Home Links and completed Math Journal pages in a timely manner! It has been great to see such excitement around math lately with the kids getting to measure in school and at home.

Social Studies

In Social Studies we have begun our second unit - The Geography of our Community. We have begun working on our map skills. While many of us depend on our phones and devices in cars to get us from point A to point B, it is still important for our students to have basic map skills (like when you are at the mall, lost in the halls of Dublin, or trying to find your terminal at the airport). We have looked at a few different maps and focused in on finding the key, the title, and deciphering where things are located on the map using the cardinal directions (north, south, east and west) and also learning to use location words (below, next to, near by, in front of, behind, above, to the left of, to the right of, etc.) 

Soon we will dig deeper with the map of White Lake and begin to notice all of the features our community offers including several schools, roads, parks, lakes and more!

If you have any pocket type maps at home that you would like to share, please put your child's name on them and send them in! We will do our best to look and use them carefully.

iReady Diagnostic

The time has come for us to take our second iReady Diagnostic of the school year. This week we will take the reading portion and in the next few weeks we will take the math portion. We spent time this week reviewing the different parts of iReady - what we see on the screen, how to choose the best answer, reminders to do our best and to take our time. Be sure to check in with your child and ask how this is going for them. We use the laptops in our classroom and let the kids work wherever they are most comfortable. Remember, each child has their own test and the questions will vary based on what they answer correctly or incorrectly. Look for more info soon on your child's progress on this one of many tools we use to check in on student learning and growth.

Important Reminders and Dates

Outdoor Recess

Outdoor Recess is a funny thing in Michigan in January. Our children will go outside every day as long as the playground is not icy. If it is raining we will be indoors. To remain indoors on cold days, we need a windchill below zero. Otherwise, you should plan for your child to go out daily. While you might not see a lot of snow, the playground is wet and muddy. Snow gear helps protect your child and their clothes. An extra pair of sock in their backpacks is also a great idea. I would suggest checking your child's winter gear nightly as many things need to be washed and dried out. Thank you!

Monday, January 15th Martin Luther King Jr. Day - No School. The WLCSD Martin Luther King Jr. event will begin at 6pm at Walled Lake Northern High School

Thursday, January 18th Parent - Teacher Conferences beginning at 12 noon running through 8pm. Please sign up on Skyward if you have not already. There are still many time slots available and I would love to meet with everyone. Please remember we will begin dismissal around 11am on that Thursday.

Friday, January 19th Student Council Sponsored Spirit Wear Day - it's Tropical Day at Dublin! Be sure to send your child in their best tropical attire. Remember, we will still have outdoor recess that day and will need your child to have warm clothes to wear outdoors.

Friday, January 19th PTA Sponsored Family BINGO Night at Dublin: Come join the Weckstein's and play BINGO! Wouldn't it be fun if we had our own table full of Weckies? Hope to see you there!