Friday, September 11th

And that’s a wrap on Week 2 of our Virtual Learning! I have to tell you just how PROUD we are of our second graders across our grade level this year. Our kids have been working SO incredibly hard… they are brave, they are resilient, they are inspirational and they are simply the best! We have watched them learn how to navigate our Google Classroom page, ConnectEd for Everyday Math, Epic Books and Seesaw! Daily we are challenging ourselves and working our brains harder than ever… and it is really showing! Thank you for all of your help on the homefront, we are in this together!

Readers’ Workshop

This week in Readers’ Workshop we have begun establishing more of a routine around the format of our workshop. We begin with a mini-lesson that lasts about 10-15 minutes, and then have the kids move into Independent Reading time. We have talked a great deal the last two weeks about “Smart” or “Comfy” reading spots and we have encouraged your children to get creative so that they are able to do their best work as a reader. Daily during this independent reading time we will be putting the kids in breakout rooms alone simply so that they are not distracted by everyone on the screen and so that we can then pop into the breakout room and hear your child read. It will help when we get more of a system down for conferring and small guided reading groups that your child will know which days they need to read close by to their computer and which days they can move a little further away. More info coming soon!

This week we also shared many of our favorite books from the summer. It was fun to hear the kids so excited talking about books!

Writers’ Workshop

This week in the Writers' Workshop we launched our first unit of study. We have shown our writers’ the first two videos in the unit from our virtual units of study. The first lesson talked about how we plan for writing a story. The co-teacher in the video suggested ways that our writers’ could do some systematic planning before actually writing their stories. I modeled my own example with the kids about a trip we took this summer to the Boulder Ridge Zoo, and in particular, all about our experience in the interactive birdhouse! Our young writers then went to breakout groups to share with friends their ideas for their writing today before we got writing. Lastly they moved into their own breakout rooms to work on their story plans and begin their draft! Our second session was focused on looking at second grade writing examples to help inspire ourselves as writers! We dug deeper with what we noticed about the writing that we CAN already do as new 2nd graders! Our writers were excited to see samples of second grade writing. I have put an example of writing paper that your child can use in our Google Classroom under the “Helpful Parent Links” topic in the classwork section.

Phonics

This week we began our first phonics unit! We began with looking at words that we called “Bloopers” because they were spelled comically, or how a second grader might spell them! We looked specifically at the “bossy r” and how we use the letter “r” in our words. Kids were sent off to find examples of “r” words in their own writing and around their learning spaces. Next we played with five SNAP words this week. These are words we would encourage your children to know “snappy” for lack of better terms!! Words that they are able to spell easily, recognize quickly and read fluently. The SNAP words we played with this week included: under, over, their, were and want. Our final lesson has us investigating deeper with the -ar, -er and -or endings in words.

Math Workshop

In Math this week we spent more time practicing logging into ConnectEd, the online component of our Everyday Math program. We explored further with the E Toolkit as well as the Everyday Math Games! The kids really enjoyed playing the games and exploring with the tools in the virtual “Toolkit”. Then we began our first lesson talking about how “Numbers are all around”. We took time to look at our class number line and talked about all that we have learned from K and 1st grade about number lines. We brainstormed ways we can use number lines and I pointed out the number line in their math journal cover. Next week we will be creating our own number lines and learn how to play “Number Line Squeeze”. There is a printable number line in our Google Classroom Page in the “Helpful Parent Links” section for Math Unit 1 Documents. Please feel free to print this to have for math next week on Tuesday! If you are unable, we will show the kids how they can also make their own number line on a piece of paper. Also in the Math Unit 1 Documents you will find information about our Unit 1 Homelinks (Parent Letter for Unit 1) as well as HomeLinks that we will use in the coming weeks

Social Studies

This week we launched our first social studies unit - Our Local Community. We started simply by looking at our own community, our virtual classroom. We listened to an awesome and very new book called “Our Class is a Family”. We talked about how we became a family when the school year began, a class family, and how even Dublin is like our giant school family! We then brainstormed in breakout groups what we want to see in our learning community this year with: how our learning community would look, how our learning community would sound and how our learning community would feel. The kids had some stellar ideas to share about this and we created a giant web! I get the feeling we will add to this web as we learn more about our virtual community and how we work best together!

Important Dates

*Curriculum Night: Our K-2 Curriculum Night is at 6:30pm on Monday, September 14th! You will simply be joining us in our classroom Zoom (minus the kids) at 6:30pm. We will watch a short video from Mr. Drewno and then use the remainder of time to talk about our 2nd grade curriculum this year, classroom routines and answer any lingering questions you may have about the year ahead!

*Date Change: There is a date on the WLCSD calendar that has not been updated! Our half day of school on September 23rd has been moved to a half day of school on September 25th to accommodate the middle school and high school block schedule. We will have a full day the 23rd, half day the 25th. This contradicts the district calendar online but has officially been changed.