Friday, February 2nd

 Friday, February 2nd - Happy Friday!!

Happy Friday Weckie Families! What a wild winter season we had in January... and so many days off from school. Yikes!

We have continued to work hard and pick right up where we have left off after each little mini-break! We have been busy working hard and learning lots!

**IMPORTANT UPCOMING DATES** There's a lot upcoming, so I want to put this FIRST in our blog post for today:

1. Wednesday, February 7th - Global Day of Play - Dublin Elementary is participating once more in this fun World Wide event to get kids PLAYING together. We are going to celebrate in the afternoon of the 7th and ask that your children bring TWO toys from home that do not need electricity, batteries, have screens, etc.. Think board games, Barbies, puzzles, etc.. Please make sure that everything is labeled with your child's name so that everything that comes in makes it back home safely. Please make sure your child's toys are "school appropriate".

2. Friday, February 9th - 100th Day of School - This is the day where we want your children dressed as their best senior citizen self day! Please remember we also need a BINGO prize from each child to contribute to our big BINGO game that day. Prizes should be small and no more than $1 in value. If you are not able to provide a prize, please let me know ASAP so we can plan accordingly for ALL.

3. Tuesday, February 13th - Valentine's Boxes and Valentine's cards DUE into school! Please send your box creations and Valentine cards in on the 13th so that we can get everything ready for the BIG day on the 14th! If you need another copy of the class list, please let me know ASAP!! The list was on the back of the original "Valentine's Box" note.

4. Wednesday, February 14th - Class Valentine's Day Party! We will be celebrating the 14th with a craft, a movie and an ice cream sundae bar! We are still in need of donations for our Sign-Up Genius. We are not in need of any parent volunteers at this point. Mrs. Wolfe and Mrs. Chenoweth are our V-Day party planners and they'll be on hand to help scoop ice cream. 

Click here for the Valentine's Sign Up

5. NO SCHOOL - February 19-23 for Mid-Winter Break

Now, have you wondered what we've been up to academically? :-)

Phonics:

In Phonics we have been learning how to break apart big words! We spent a great deal of time on a variety of strategies shown on the chart below. 

This is a great list to refer to at home with your Weckie as they have spent a lot of time practicing each of these strategies! Then we moved on to working with consonants that camouflage and blend in with other letters - combinations like: wr, kn and gn. You'll notice in words with "wr" you only hear the /r/ sound and in words with "kn" you hear the /n/ sound and words with "gn" you hear the /n/ sound. We then dug deeper into the two sounds that c and g can make. Ask your child to tell you about the soft c (cider)/ soft g (gem), and hard c (common)/hard g (garden). We will be digging deeper with those hard and soft sounds next week!

Readers' Workshop:

Our readers have been immersed in non-fiction reading for awhile now and are quite the expert readers of informational texts! We have stopped to talk about reading non-fiction for information and how non-fiction can differ from fiction because with a fiction story you have to read cover to cover whereas with non-fiction you can dip in and dip out for info. We have looked at non-fiction features like: Table of Contents, Glossary, Index, labeled diagrams, bold words, photographs, captions, how-to, maps, tables and graphs! Students have taken time to jot down new information that they have learned that they could teach their partner in workshop time!

We FINALLY completed all of the iReady Reading Diagnostic this week for all. Between snow days and illnesses, this took much longer than anticipated. Scores will be coming home next week and parents will be contacted if their child needs further reading intervention.

Writers' Workshop:

We are beginning to wrap up our non-fiction writing unit this week. We have quite the experts in our classroom on a variety of topics! Next week they'll be picking one of their writing pieces to take through the publishing process. Look for these to come home in a few weeks! I love to leave them in a basket in the classroom library once completed so that other kids can read their work, learn and enjoy!

Math Workshop:

We have been measuring EVERYTHING lately in math!! Our mathematicians have gotten quite good at measuring with centimeters and inches! They have been all over the classroom measuring all sorts of small, medium and large spaces/objects! It's fun to get them up and moving and see their excitement about measuring. We ended the week with Math Stations where they had practice with: fact triangles for subtraction, story problems with friendly 10s, measuring a crooked path, creating arrays and two STEM type activities with building involved. They LOVED learning to play a new game called "Buildzi"!

 

Friday, January 11th - Happy Snowy Friday!

 Happy Snowy Friday Weckie Fams!

We are back in the routine of things here and have had a great 8 days back from Winter Break! The weather this week has been a doozy in true Michigan winter fashion. Please make sure to send ALL winter gear daily as we are going outside for recess daily and many kids are complaining of being cold or unprepared. I would suggest just keeping snow-pants, boots, hat and gloves in a bag that goes back and forth daily. A few are also keeping extra gloves, socks and pants in their backpacks which is also a great idea for days when the playground is extra wet!

                                                                

                                                             

We began 2024 by writing our New Years Resolutions! Lots of great ideas of new goals the kids had for the year!

Word Work

In Word Work this week we are working on tackling long words part by part! We have taken time to:

• Work methodically across big words from beginning to end
• Break between two consonants in the middle of words 
• Keep digraphs together (ie. 'gh' in words)
• Keep endings together (-ing, -ed, -s, -es, and -er)

This is an important list of strategies kids can use when breaking up these two and three syllable words that they are coming across in their reading. We also spent time learning a new rule this week. When breaking a word up in the middle between a double consonant, the first vowel tends to be short (think of the word hopping - the 'o' makes an 'ah' sound, a short o compared to the word hoping, where there is not a double consonant, so the 'o' makes a long vowel sound and says it's name like 'oh'. We compared several words like: hopping/hoping, dinner/diner, supper/super, tapping/taping. New SNAP words were added to our SNAP words book this week including: better, different, happen and follow. Notice, they all have that double consonant in the middle and the first vowel makes the short sound!

Readers' Workshop

In Readers' Workshop we are reading two mentor non-fiction texts all about volcanoes! We spent time this week zooming in on "expert words" within the texts. These are words that help us to be a better expert on the topic of the book. Expert words we found in our volcano books included: crust, mantle, core, magna, lava and erupt! Students then had time to collect their own expert words on non-fiction books during independent and partner reading. It was cool to hear all of these big words being played with and defined by our young experts!

 

Writers' Workshop

The talk of reading expert words in non-fiction has carried over to the ability to use expert words in our own non-fiction writing that we are creating. Each writer is currently working on their own expert non-fiction chapter book and has been challenged now to make sure they are including those expert words. These are word we would expect to see boldfaced in the writing and soon to be included in the glossary they will create for the back of their books! It has been fun to see the wide range of expert topics we are including in our classroom, from how to play different sports, to how to play different video games and then even about the different kinds of pastas and dance classes you can take!

Mathematics

In Math we are working on two big concepts. First we have spent a great deal of energy learning how to tell time! We have created our own clocks and have been practicing learning how to tell time on the clocks to the nearest 5-minute interval. Kids needing extra practice have been learning to play a clock concentration game to make telling time a little more engaging and also meaningful as they have to be able to read the clock to find the match! Additionally, we are working on place value in math. We got out the base-ten blocks this week and practiced making numbers with partners that were representing numbers up to 360 in base-10 blocks. Students were given a challenge today to explain how they knew what number was represented by a large amount of base-10 blocks. It was fun to watch their minds spin as they figured out what number was shown but then also had to explain how they knew the correct answer.

Hundreds Day

Info has come home with the kids on Thursday about 100s Day at Dublin! We plan to celebrate on Friday, February 2nd and need your kids to come as 100 year old students that day! If you have any questions about attire, accessories or the BINGO prize, please let me know asap. It's such an incredibly fun day... please tell your child not to be shy, the more dressed up, the more fun they'll have! Nana Weckstein is excited to see everyone on February 2nd!

Monday, November 20, 2023

 Hello Weckie Families!!

It's been a few weeks but boy have we been busy on our end!! Thank you to all who have already sent in donations for our Food Drive at Dublin! Remember, we are collecting for Hospitality House in Walled Lake, to collect non-perishable foods. Our crew has already brought in a bunch of great items! This week your child will be bringing home their Unit 2 Math Assessment as well as some fun Thanksgiving goodies for you to enjoy with your families. The red books are something I have done for years, spanning back to my student teaching year with Laura Kauffman, and something I hope you can truly enjoy, share, and laugh about 15 years from now with your Weckie ... you'll see!

Readers' Workshop & Phonics

In Readers' Workshop we have wrapped up our first unit! We have been able to combine a bit of Phonics and Readers' as they have overlapped on similar topics! We have spent the last few weeks doing things like: working with vowel teams, spelling with familiar patterns, learning new words from the words we know with these patterns, looking at patterns in rhyming words (which can sometimes be spelled the same, and sometimes be spelled different - i.e. poor and more rhyme, but are spelled differently), and then used everything we know about rhyming words to find the rhyming patterns in a silly story called, "Knight School". Students have worked with partners and small groups to practice reading skills too! We are now moving into a non-fiction unit in readers, and a deconstructing big words unit in phonics!

Writers' Workshop

We have finally reached the conclusion of our small moments writing unit... yay! We are going to celebrate on Tuesday with a Publishing Party! Students have been deep in a revision cycle where they have spent time going back to the  stories they have created to dig deeper and make sure they have all components of a small moment. Students have used a "Narrative Checklist" to check for things like: a detailed beginning, a setting, characters with feelings mentioned, a story that stretches across many pages, a story that stays in the moment, an ending that wraps things up and even attention to capitals, lowercase letters, spelling and punctuation! I am so excited to celebrate all of their hard work with them tomorrow!

Science

In Science we have successfully grown wheat seeds... in straws!! That's right, you read that correctly. I posed a question, "Can you grow a seed without soil?" and the ENTIRE class said no. We had spent so much time talking about the importance of the soil for our brassica plants that not much attention was given to the possibility of a plant, growing without soil. Yet, several (not all), but several students have successfully grown a wheat seed in a straw. Next we planted grass and alfalfa seeds which we will use to imitate a lawn! Students will be trimming their lawns this week to see if the grass and alfalfa will regrow back! To be continued...

Mathematics

In our Math learning we have dug deep lately with various addition and subtraction strategies. Students are learning to use a variety of ways to solve these problems so that ultimately they can choose the way that works best for them! In the Unit 2 Assessment coming home today, please make sure to take time to praise your child for all of their great work and learning. Please also make sure to review anything that was still confusing to them. Coins are for sure something many of our kids need extra practice with. Helper facts using doubles also comes up on the front page as a tricky things for kids to do, yet they are SO good at rattling off doubles facts and answers! These tests do not need to be returned to school.

Important Dates:

*Wednesday, November 22nd: Field Trip Permission Slip and $16 DUE

*Thursday, November 23 and Friday, November 24- NO School for Thanksgiving Holiday

*Wednesday, November 29th: Field Trip to the Walled Lake Outdoor Education Center - INFO will come home on Monday with a reminder of how to dress/what to pack, etc. ALL kids will need a brown paper bag type lunch - disposable items only please. Depending on weather, we'll make recommendations closer to the date for clothing attire as we plan to be outside on and off throughout the day!

*Thursday, November 30th: Conferences Sign-Up on Skyward

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)

Friday, September 22nd - Happy Fall Friday :-)

 Happy Fall Friday Weckie Fams!

We have had an incredible two weeks of learning and growing together as a group! Wow have they really done a nice job tackling routines and expectations in our classroom. I love this time of year as you begin to see all of the things we do daily, repetitively, become part of their routine. Our stamina in workshops is lengthening, partnerships are forming for things like math, phonics and reading, and new friendships are also being made!

I sent out information this week about a classroom directory. Please remember to add your contact info (as much, or as little as you want to share) onto our Google form ASAP! Here is the link: https://forms.gle/VJTPMPCEY7ZkDfeR7

Phonics:

In Phonics we have been reviewing concepts like: vowel teams (two vowels put together in a word), long vowels (times in words when vowels say their name), and beginning to work with our second grade SNAP words (words we should be able to read/write in a snap). We have introduced routines for working with partners during phonics, been hunting for examples of vowel teams in poems and around the room and then also took time to begin playing with a familiar text from Readers' Workshop, "Those Darn Squirrels" by Adam Rubin looking for examples of our "Phonics Professor Words". Please look for a list of SNAP words to come home with your child in their folder next week. (There's already too much coming home today).  You'll want to hang onto this list to review these words at home with your Weckie. 

Readers' Workshop:

In Readers' Workshop we have launched our first unit of study: Becoming a Big Kid Reader. We have been reviewing different skills we learned in first grade as readers that we will continue to use as second grade readers! We began talking with how Big Kid Readers: Read all through the day, across the whole word; Read longer books, using bookmarks to save one's place; and Read smoothly in phrases, right from the start. New partnerships have been formed and the kids are partnered up with a reader(s) who is just like them in ability and skill! I'm in the process of compiling iReady Reading data and will be reaching out to parents soon who have children who have qualified for an IRIP (Individualized Reading Improvement Plan) based on their score from the diagnostic. These kids will work with me in specific small groups to target learning goals that need more practice.

Writers' Workshop:

We are in the midst of a great unit in writing with our small moments. Writers' took time this week to formulate many different beginnings that they could use to tell their story (on stickie notes) and then picked one to move forward with. Today they had time to begin to brainstorm many different endings for their story (and next week again, they'll pick their best). It's always a fun unit to hear about the different "important" events in their lives that they choose to tell about in their narratives.

Math Workshop:

In Math we continue working to review concepts covered in first grade in our unit. We have done work with: coin value, counting on number lines, making combinations of 10, skip counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s, and we have been practicing filling in number grid puzzles. Our mathematicians have been exploring the Everyday Math suite online and learning to play new games on the site. They also had time this week to learn a new game called: Fishing for 10s after exploring their new math toolkits!

Social Studies:

We are well on our way in our new social studies unit as well! We have been learning all about families and traditions. This week we took time to talk about our extended families and all of the people we might include in our extended family. (I have to add, I love that my face made a cameo in many of their extended family drawings!)

Friday, September 8th - Welcome to 2nd Grade

 

Hello Weckie Families! Thanks for checking out our classroom blog and reading about all of the great things happening in second grade. We sure have been busy these first 8 days of school! We have been tackling classroom routines, classroom expectations, routines for workshops and routines for lunch and recess! We have come a LONG way in the first 8 days and have also been having a ton of fun getting to know each other better. We have done a couple of mixer games and have a running game going right now called, "Two Truths and a Lie". We have had fun learning more about each other and guessing what the truths are verses what the lie was. 

Thank you for sending your children each morning to school prepared to do their best! Please make sure that they always have: a snack, a water bottle and their purple folder every day. The office has not had "Emergency" snacks yet.

Phonics

We have just begun our first unit of Phonics titled, "Growing into Second Grade Phonics".  Our first series of lessons took a look at phonics words and concepts your children worked with in first grade. We received the ideas that we called Phonics Professors Words including: capitals, syllables, consonants, vowels, word parts, short vowels, long vowels, blends, digraphs, silent e, vowel teams, r-controlled vowels and contractions. These are all concepts we will continue to dig deeper with in second grade. We used our own names to check for these different phonics professor words and were surprised by what we found! (I.E. r-controlled vowels, silent e, number of syllables, vowels/consonants, short vowels/long vowels and more! Today we began working to review the silent e and how typically in a word with cvc+silent e, the vowel is a long vowel. For example, think of the name Nate. It ends with a silent e, and the 'a' vowel is long in Nate (long vowels say their name). We will continue working with this combination of long vowels and the silent e next week.

Readers' Workshop

We have very slowly launched our Readers' Workshop! We have built our reading stamina up to 15 minutes of focused, on task quiet independent reading time. I have enjoyed conferring with the kids listening to them read, hearing about their reading likes and dislikes and helping them to find a comfy spot to read around our room. We LOVED sharing our favorite books this week and found a lot of us enjoy the same book series or the same author! Thank you for sending these in to share :-).

Writers' Workshop

We have also slowly launched our Writers' Workshop! Writers' completed an On-Demand narrative piece last week where they were given time to write about a time they did something. A rubric will be used to score their writing and then guide my instruction through our narrative unit to help make us stronger writers! This week we launched that first personal narrative writing unit by brainstorming watermelons (big ideas) and seeds (events from the big idea). For example, my watermelon was our family trip to Atlanta this summer! My seeds were: The Georgia Aquarium, the Braves vs. Yankees baseball game and the Zoo Atlanta. Each one of those seeds will be a great small moment that I can write about later in the unit. 

Math Workshop

In Math we have begun learning routines for whole group instruction! We will rotate math instruction this year where some days we will work whole group and other days we will work in small groups. The first unit of study lends nicely to the whole group as we set up routines for slate work, then a mini lesson (right now lots of reviewing first grade concepts), introduce new games and work on journal pages. As the year goes on, we'll move into a more small group format where kids will work at their just-right level through the math journal pages, games will be differentiated to match learners and small group instruction will be needs based.  ("Number Line Squeeze" game pics below!)

Social Studies

This year in Walled Lake we have a brand new social studies program! The kids were super excited about their ginormous workbooks (literally excited, I promise) filled with colorful photos, activities, songs and more. We decided in second grade this year not to purchase Scholastic News magazines because the new curriculum looks a lot like Scholastic. Our first intro to the unit was all about families and how families from the past change to families today, but many of our traditions remain the same. We talked about different holidays that are important to our families and how our ancestors celebrated the same holidays similarly and differently.

Important Info:

Curriculum Night is Tuesday, September 12th at 6pm! Please meet in our classroom, Room 202 at 6pm. This is an adults only night.