The Beginning of Second Grade

Welcome to our 2nd grade blog!

So strange to say we finished our 3rd week of school, but have had only attended for 10 days! With this gradual transition we are all settling into routines and creating new friendships. From my perspective we have a great group of students who show kindness and positive attitudes. I am excited to see what we will learn and accomplish this year together!

This first blog will be a bit longer than most, but please read it through to learn more about your child's 2nd grade experience.

Important items: 

·         Please always take time to review all work sent home in your child's folder.  Note that if they are marked with a B,D or S they represent beginning skill level, developing at grade level and secure (a 1/2 sheet explanation was part of the curriculum packet). These are the grades you'll see on the report cards as well.

·         Cookie Dough sales start this week.  This is a Dublin fundraiser to help raise money for the many activities our PTA plans and organizes for our families. 

·         PTA is running a contest for membership among classrooms.  Please consider joining, as it is an incredible support to your child's school experience. If you did not attend curriculum night, you may want to check out our PTA Website to see the video they presented.  It was fun and informative.  One of the myths it clarified was that you do not have to attend meetings to become a member...another point was the benefits you get from joining.  A big one is the Dublin student contact book with families' addresses for birthday parties and such.

·         No School this coming Wednesday (Yom Kippur)

·         Picture day is September 24th and we have one of the first time slots at 9:15am (PLEASE BE ON TIME!)

LANGUAGE WORKSHOP

Students enjoyed the story, Wolf. This book shares the concepts of perseverance and practice with learning.  As discussed at curriculum night, we use a growth mindset each day in our classroom. I'll send the video in case you missed it (https://youtu.be/KUWn_TJTrnU).  This coming week we will read Goldisocks and the Three Libearians to learn about choosing just right books and discuss comparisons between classic tales and fractured (rewritten) tales.

WORD STUDY

We quickly recognized that most 2nd graders are not confident with short and long vowel sounds.  This is a crucial concept they must learn quickly to continue with 2nd grade expectations.  We made plans to practice this through charts, chants and songs daily. We also had lessons on consonant clusters. Some students tend to place a vowel sound between the blend such as "bul" for "bl".  Please practice these with your child and ask him/her to name the blends. For example, ask what letters make the blend in dress.

WRITER'S WORKSHOP

Our launching unit teaches expectations and components of writer's workshop with poetry. Next week we begin writing our own poetry. Mini lessons included:

·         Basics of poetry

·         How to study a poem

·         Poets & writers write from the heart

MATH WORKSHOP

Math workshop seems to be the favorite at this point.  We do a lot of hands-on practice.  We have also started some work in our math journals.  Because we do much of our practice work in class in these journals, you won't always see a lot of math practice coming home.  However, our home link (homework sheets) will begin at the end of unit 1.  Please take time to review your child's home link work with him/her before returning them back to school.  This is a time when you will be able to help support your child's learning one on one. I am noticing a handful of students that seem to be struggling with basic number concepts including place value (tens and ones) and hundred grid concepts. 

 Here is a snapshot of our beginning lessons:

·         Practice making 10

·         Beginning year pre-assessment

·         Recognizing penny, nickel, dime and quarter (and the value of each)

·         Review of number lines and how they work

·         Review of 100 grid and 4 important rules on using them (ask your child to tell you the 4 rules...I taught and reviewed them 3 days (going down one adds 10, going up one subtracts 10, going right one adds 1 and going left or back one subtracts 1)

·         Students were introduced to math work stations

·         Open response work...students solve a problem and have to explain how they did so in written form.  This is difficult for many, but will be a large part of our math learning this year.  

SOCIAL STUDIES

We are beginning our first unit on our local community.  For this unit, we introduce it by first creating our classroom community. Here is the classroom promise our class created for our community after learning all about the Constitution on Constitution Day! We have set the bar high for the year with outstanding expectations from all of our learners in 204.

Welcome to 2nd Grade Weckies :-)

Hey, Hey New Weckie Families!!

 Welcome to our Classroom News Blog for our year in Second Grade!  Be sure to bookmark this webpage as updates will be posted on here with all of the news and photos coming out of our classroom this year. 

I am so excited to get to know you this year in my classroom. Here's just a glimpse of the fun Mrs. Weckstein had this summer with her family and friends! 

Friday, May 18, 2018

Hello Weckie Families!!

What a fun and busy last few weeks we have had... From our field trip to the Troy Historic Village, to a Naturalist bringing in live birds, to Spring Clean Up and Field Day, we have been having FUN. Thank you for all of your help in making sure your child has been prepared and ready. It sure has helped that we have had FANTASTIC weather on these special days.

Readers' and Writers' Workshop
Our workshops have gone hand in hand for the last month or so as we dug deeper into our non-fiction studies. In Readers' Workshop we focused on learning how to pull facts about our birds from texts and then in Writers' we took our research and created paragraphs about our findings: physical description, habitat and nesting, food and eating habits, interesting facts and labeled diagrams of our Michigan birds have all been covered. Please be sure to look for our awesome bird report articles up in the hallway of our classroom. Our kids spent a great deal of time becoming experts about our Michigan birds and learning how to write an informational article about their bird!

We celebrated all of our hard work about birds with a Naturalist visit from the Leslie Nature Center. The kids absolutely LOVED seeing a live: red tailed hawk, kestrel and barred owl! I heard so many comments after about how neat it was to see the animals we had been learning about live and to watch how they interacted with the trainer and even us! You'll see pictures at the end of the blog.

Math Workshop
In math we have spent a lot of time lately with shapes. We have been learning about 2-dimensional shapes like: square, triangle, rhombus, circle, parallelogram, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon and octagon. Then we moved into 3-dimensional shapes and learned about the: sphere, cube, cylinder, cone, rectangular pyramid, rectangular prism, triangular pyramid and square pyramid. These are all shapes our students must be familiar with to continue to grow in third grade math! Then we spent time looking at rectangles, and how we could partition them equally with one inch squares and unifix cubes. This was helping to teach our students how to find the area of a shape while also warming them up for making arrays for multiplication which we moved onto finally! Please remember this is the very early stages of multiplying and this part can be tricky for our second graders. Unit 7 tests will be coming home either today or Monday and we actually just completed the Unit 8 test as this was a shorter unit on geometry and arrays!

Building 3-dimensional shapes in Math:

Social Studies
We are well on our way with our next Social Studies Unit - our Local Economy. This unit will help our students to understand what the local economy includes (businesses which either provide goods, services or both). They will be learning about being producers and consumers and the roles behind each. Additionally we will have a Market Day, similar to first grade, coming up on Friday, June 1st. More info will come home soon explaining this fun experiential day for our students!

iReady Update
We have just completed the Reading iReady Assessment and end of the year info will be coming home with your child soon. The results were very interesting - obviously the test continues to get harder but our students are now able to read more and do more deeper comprehension as well as have a better set of vocabulary by May. Most students improved and many by leaps and bounds (yay!). Some students who were already in the "on range" category grew some or actually decreased, only because the intensity of the test also increased. You will see when it all comes home.  We are nearly done with the math portion as well - there are still a handful of kiddos who will be finishing that up next week!

Have a fantastic weekend - thanks to all who sent in gifts for Teacher Appreciation Week - that was so kind, touching and generous of you! I absolutely love what I do and love being alongside your kiddos for the journey. It's hard to believe how fast our time is going and to think we are nearly to Memorial Day Weekend!  :-) Mrs. Weckstein

A snapshot of our Field Trip to the Troy Historic Museum...

Two of our classmates were recognized at the WLCSD Board Meeting for May for their great art work!

A glimpse into our In School Field Trip Bird Experience:

Then we had our big school Sing Along for "Send it On":

And then we cleaned up the Unity Garden Courtyard between 2nd and 1st Grade:

Oh, but wait! Then we had Field Day :-)...