Happy Holidays!

The Firefly Team had a wonderful day filled with special snacks, beverages and a movie (Babe in the City).  A huge thank you to Lisa Deavitt, Maggie Stief, Zynnia Seidita, Kristen Bingel and Elaine Brand for all the wonderful treats they sent in to make it a special day for us today.
A huge thank you to all my families for all the thoughtful gifts.  I am overwhelmed by your generosity.
I hope everyone has a happy, healthy holiday vacation.  See you in 2012!

Exploravision Opportunity

The Firefly Second Grade has decided to take part in the Exploravision Competition sponsored by the National Science Teachers Association and Toshiba.  Exploravision is a hands-on project- based opportunity for “students to combine their imaginations with the tools of science to create and explore a vision of a future technology”.  Students will work in small groups of four to explore a new technology. They must also project what that technology will be like 20 years from now and what scientific breakthroughs must happen in order for their technology to become a reality.

This will be a three week project which will take place in January starting on Monday, January 9^th.  We will meet Mondays and Wednesdays as needed after school from 3-4 PM.  If you would like your child to participate in this project you will need to pick your child up at school at 4 PM on these days. 

At this time, Kristen Bingel has offered to coach a team.  If more than 4 students are interested in this opportunity, we will need another parent to coach a second team.  If there are no other parents to coach, but we have more than 4 students, we will draw 3 names out of the hat to participate.  Please let me know by January 4^th if your child is interested in participating. 

I will let you know the first week in January if we are in need of a second coach.

For more information about this opportunity go to :  www.exploravision.org/2012

Thanks,

Deb

   

Habits of Mind: Questioning

Personalize your own slideshow On Tuesday we had a special visitor come to our classroom. Her name is Heather Baron and she is working with our school on Differentiated Instruction. She came to our team this week to teach the children one of the 16 Habits of Mind. We looked at the importance of questioning when learning. We talked about our visit from Tao last week and brainstormed questions that we might want to ask her using question starters such as I wonder why...., I wonder if...., I wonder how..... They came up with these in groups of 4 & 5 and then picked one burning question to share with the group. They came up with some very thought provoking questions about what Tao had shared. We followed up with this by writing thank you letters to Tao and asking her our questions in those letters.  We hope to get answers from Tao next week. This week in Science and Social Studies we continued to learn about "Animals" and "Long Ago". In Mrs. Nakhleh's classroom they learned about Colonial homes and about schools from long ago. They made Keeping room dioramas and then horn books. Next week they will look at Colonial time jobs. In Mrs. KillKelley's room we learned about animal adaptations.  Next week we will begin our Endangered Species projects.  Each student will choose an endanagered species in the United States to learn about and create a plan to save it from extinction.  We continued to explore relationships between various 2 and 3 dimensional shapes in Math this week.  We learned new work station games that support our learning for this unit.  Our focus for Writer's Workshop continues to be on editing our work.  Our Readers Workshop has focused on reading strategies.  We will finish Unit 7 and our learning about open syllables in Fundations next week. Please have your child return this week's homework and Friday Folder on Thursday of this coming week as there will be no school on Friday.  There will be no homework over the holiday break. Have a great weekend!

Thank you for Craft Fair Help

A huge thank you to all those parents who helped at the Holiday Craft Fair last Saturday.  Unfortunately the balloons were not the hit we thought they would be and we did not make any money.  We did, however, have a terrific time and it was a great experience for all of our Firefly students, so it was well worth the effort!

PTO FOOD BASKET COLLECTION

PTO FOOD BASKET COLLECTION

Every year the PTO sponsors a special collection of lunch, breakfast, snack and holiday meal foods for local families to enjoy during the holiday vacation break. We are always amazed by the generosity of our school community for this event, and we appreciate it very much. In the past we have asked every student to donate one of the assigned items and we have had plenty to go around. Due to the increase in need, please send in an extra item if you’re able to. In addition, if you are willing to donate laundry detergent, that can be dropped off at the main office. Thank you and enjoy the holiday season. Contact Jan Thabault at jthabault@cssu.org with any questions.

IMPORTANT: Deadline is Tuesday, December 20th

  Team/Classroom – donation item

  Pre –K – cans of soup

  Journey – Boxes of Cereal

  Treehouse - Packaged Cookies

  Firefly – Boxed Snack Food (Granola Bars, Rice Krispie Treats etc.)

  Dragonfly– Cans of Fruits and Vegetables

  Inspire – Boxes of Crackers or Cracker Snacks

  Kaleidoscope – Boxes of Side Dishes (Mashed Potatoes, Stuffing, Rice etc)

  Imagine –Boxes of Macaroni and Cheese or Easy Mac

                        

  Believe – cans of ravioli, spaghettios, etc

  Discover – fruit cups or applesauce

  Endeavor – C. Crowther – Shampoo; P. Baldwin – Hair Conditioner

  Polaris – P. Cyr – jars of jelly; B. Gurwitz – peanut butter

  Voyager - Bags of Bagels or Sandwich Bread

  Alpha – Yogurt and Yogurt Snacks

  Holden – E. Brunvand –Apples; M. O’Toole – Bags of Carrots; R. Halnon –Oranges

Symphony  - C. Bennett – Refrigerated Cookie Dough; D. Morrill –Bricks of Cheese or String                                      Cheese;   D. Southworth – Packaged Sandwich Meat

  Winton – K. Sheerin – Shampoo; M. Harris & L. Phelps – Toothpaste and /or Tooth Brushes

Our Week With Tao Ye

This free photo slideshow made with Smilebox

Tao Ye, a visiting 27 year old Chinese teacher from Lijiang, China spent 3 days with our class this week. She taught the class how to say chinese numbers from 1-10 and also taught them how to write some words in Chinese. Tao spoke to us about her hometown in China. Lijiang is located in the southeast part of China. It has an Old Town and a New Town. She talked about the Old Town which has 800 years of history. Some of the things she shared with us:
-people are protective of the Old Town
-there are 2 wheel wells at the entrance of the town (these are pictured in the slide show)
-there are lots of small rivers located throughout the Old Town
-Si Fang square is the center of the Old Town and at night visitors come and dance with the locals who dress up in costumes
-You can ski in the mountains but to access them you have to ride a Gondola and it's so high that some people need oxygen when they go to the top
-There are no cars allowed in the Old Town
-There are 3 wells located in the town and the 1st one is for drinking water, the second is to wash vegetables, and the third is to wash laundry (this is pictured in the slide show)
-January 23rd is the Chinese New Year and this year it is the Year of the Dragon.
Today we enjoyed Chinese dumplings that Tao, Mrs. Nakhleh and Mrs. KillKelley made last night at Mrs. KillKelley's house.  We had a great time with Tao and learned a lot about China from her visit.

Our new Math Unit is "Exploring Shapes, Symmetry, Area & Number".  We will be observing, describing, sorting and exploring the relationships among many different 3-dimensional shapes during the first part of this unit.  Our new Fundations Unit will focus on open syllables (has only one vowel and it does not have a consonant after it).  We will also be introduced to y as a vowel.

On Thurs., December 22nd the Firefly team will be enjoying a special Holiday snack.  Please email me if you would like to send in a snack for this event.
I hope everyone has a great weekend!

Tao Ye -Visiting Chinese Teacher!

Firefly Second Grade spent this week getting back into the swing of things after our Thanksgiving break.  We finished up our Non-fiction unit in literacy and began talking about editing and conferring during Writer's Workshop.  We will continue to focus on editing and conferring next week and have begun meeting with partners to polish up our writing and make it even better.  Our Readers Workshop will shift from non-fiction to fiction and will focus on story elements in fictional texts.  During Fundations we have been revisiting the "magic e" rule, (vowel-consonant-e syllables).  We will continue with this rule next week and will learn about exceptions to this rule.  We will learn about the suffix ive and will learn more about compound words.
We continued to discover strategies that help us with our math fact fluency in Math this week.  We talked about doubles and neighbors, zero facts, take away tens, counting on and counting back.  We spent some time identifying which facts these strategies work for and then practiced using these strategies to solve them.  We will continue learning more strategies next week.
We look forward to spending time with the SCS visiting Chinese teacher, Tao Ye, next week.  She will be spending a week with the Firefly team teaching us about calligraphy and Chinese culture.  She will be working with Firefly Second Grade on Wednesday, Thursday and Friday during our Reader's Workshop time.

A big thank you to everyone who signed up to help out at the SCS Craft Fair tomorrow.  We have decided not to do the photo booth for several reasons, so we will be selling helium balloons and snow globes made by Firefly students.

Shelburne Farms Visit Tomorrow

Shelburne Farms will be visiting the Firefly Team tomorrow, Tues, Nov. 22 to teach us about animals in winter.  Please make sure your child is dressed appropriately to go outside, as most of the lesson will be outdoors.

Welcome Back Miss Claire!

 It was wonderful to have Miss Claire return to work this week.  She has spent the week getting used to our new routines and getting to know new students on the team.  She is already hard at work helping students with their learning and creating new bulletin boards for the Firefly team.
We are continuing our work with addition, subtraction and probability during Math.  Today was a studio day, so we had a visit from Mr. Feeley and some SCS teachers to observe our math lesson.  This was a great learning experience for everyone.
We continued our non-fiction work during Literacy and completed Unit 5 in Fundations.  We will begin Unit 6 in Fundations after the Thanksgiving break.
There will be no homework over Thanksgiving break.  The next homework packet will come home on Friday, December 3rd.
Please check the Firefly website for the Craft Fair sign-up.  We are in need of volunteers to work the day of the fair.
Our Spring conference schedule is also posted on the team webpage.  Feel free to sign up early so you can get a time that works well for you.

Hands On Nature-Seeds

It was great to have an opportunity to meet with all of you during conferences this week to share your child's progress and celebrate his/her learning!  If you have any follow up questions, please feel free to contact me.

We spent this week playing games during Math workstations that reinforce addition and subtraction facts. Next week we will continue our work with addition and subtraction. We are still working on non-fiction for Readers' and Writers' workshops and have been learning rules for dividing syllables during Fundations.  This was the last week for our current Science/Social Studies rotation.  We will begin two new units next week.  Mrs. Nakhleh will be teaching a unit about "Long Ago and Today".  I will be teaching a unit about "Animals".
We enjoyed an excellent Hands On Nature lesson about seeds this week.  We watched a puppet show about seeds, dissected seeds and went outside and searched the fields for different kinds of seeds that are dispersed in different ways.  A huge thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for this wonderful experience!

The SCS Holiday Fair will take place on Saturday, December 3rd this year.  We are taking a more "low key" approach to this event this year and are planning to make snow globes, sell helium balloons and bring back our photo booth.  We realize this is a busy time of year for families and are trying to keep it as simple as possible.  Please let us know if you have some dress up clothes you could loan us for the photo booth.  We will let you know if we need any other help preparing the snow globes as we get closer to the event and will be putting a sign up sheet on the website for families who are able to help on the day of the fair.

Firefly Second Grade Gets A New Student!

 


Firefly Second Grade got a new student this week.  We're very excited to have him join our class. He moved here from St. Louis and speaks three languages!  Everyone has done a great job of welcoming him to our classroom.
Our November shares have been going very well.  It has been terrific to see all the different things everyone is thankful for.  It is clear everyone is being very thoughtful about their November shares.
Monday was a busy day with that ended with a Firefly "Harvest" party.  First and second graders were grouped together and moved from station to station to play games, make a craft and have a snack.  It was a great afternoon of fun for the entire Firefly Team!
Benjamin presented his Discovery Table project on Monday.  His project was about his Grandparents' summer camp.  He showed us pictures, talked about the history of the camp, shared what his favorite things are to do at camp and brought in some games from long ago his family still plays at their camp.  Benjamin did an amazing presentation and created interest in his project that lasted throughout the week. Way to go, Benjamin!
We began our new math unit this week and have been playing addition and subtraction games that teach us about probability.  We have been discovering which combinations are most likely to be pulled from a bag or rolled and are making conjectures about why certain combinations are more likely than others to be pulled from the bag or rolled.
We have continued to read Non-Fiction books during Readers Workshop and Writers Workshop and are working hard on our Specialist books during Writers Workshop.  Some of my friends have been so excited about their narrative writing that they are continuing to work on their narrative stories too.  We finished Unit 4 in Fundations today and completed our Unit 4 Assessment.  We will begin Unit 5 on Monday.
I'm looking forward to meeting with all of you next week for conferences.  Please make sure you visit the website to sign up for a date and time.  I am leaving it up to you to decide who comes to the conference.  If you would like it to be parent/teacher conference that is fine.  If you would like your child to attend with you, that is also OK.  Whatever works best for your family is what's important!
Have a great weekend.

Visit From Author Doreen Cronin

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On Monday we had a visit from some sixth graders who had written stories in French.  They read their stories to us, let us color their illustrations, and left us copies to read during Readers Workshop.
Our Readers Workshop focused on response journals this week.  Writers Workshop was focused on specialist books. We began Unit 4 in Fundations, which reviews the suffixes s, es, ed and ing.  It will also introduce sounds for oa, oe, ow, ou, oo, ue and ew.
This was the last week for our ant unit.  We spent the week solving our classmate's ant problems and discussing the various solutions we came up with for those problems.  We also completed a number corner and end of unit assessment.  Next week we will begin Unit 3 which will focus on addition, subtraction and probability.
Today we had a visit from author Doreen Cronin.  She shared her book Mom and talked with us about the process she uses to create her books.  She also talked to us about how important it is to read a lot because reading helps writers get ideas and become better writers.  We had a great time and made lots of great connections to the work we have been doing in our Writers Workshop.
Firefly will be having a "Harvest" party on Monday afternoon.  We will be playing games, making a craft, and having a snack.  Please email me if you can provide a snack or juice for the party.  It is school policy that no costumes be worn at school on Halloween. 
Please be sure to go to the Firefly website and sign up for your fall conference.  We are having conferences after school during the week of November 7-11.  I look forward to meeting with everyone at this time.

Ants, Ants, Ants

Firefly Second Grade spent the week solving and creating ant story problems.  During the first part of the week we worked on problems that were already created for us.  We talked about meaning of operations and how our knowledge of this helps us solve problems.  We then used our math journals to show more than one way to solve each problem we were working on.  During the last part of the week we created our own ant story problems.  We will spend next week solving these problems in a variety of ways, sharing our thinking and talking about efficient strategies for problem solving.
We began our non-fiction unit in Writers Workshop by reviewing non-fiction text features and talking about what a "specialist" is.  We will continue with this and begin creating our own specialist books next week.  In Readers Workshop, we reviewed all the strategies we have been learning about that good readers do.  We also added ideas for writing about the books we are reading in our journals.  We finished up Fundations Unit 3 today with a unit test and will begin Unit 4 on Monday.
 We are so excited to announce that The Flying Pig has generously given SCS two 45 minute presentations by Doreen Cronin, author of Click Clack Moo, Diary of a Spider, Duck for President, etc!  Our team will be enjoying a visit from Doreen on Friday, October 28th.
I have been so impressed with the homework that is coming in to school.  Many students are handing their homework in early, doing extra work and we even had a few students choose to make a dance and create songs this week.  It is fun for me to see what everyone will come up with each week.
Enjoy the long weekend!

Hands On Nature

 

Firefly Second Grade spent this week finishing up some activities we have been working on and beginning new learning that we will continue with throughout the month of October.  We finished our first social studies/science rotation and switched groups for the next rotation.  We will continue with these groups through the middle of November. 

We finished up the first 20 Days of Writers Workshop discussing conferring, editing and publishing.  We also created a Firefly Published Works bin so we can share our published writing with our friends.  We will move into a non-fiction unit next week that ties into our math learning ,and will begin writing expert and specialist books.  Our Readers Workshop focused on inferring, visualizing, summarizing, synthesizing and finding big ideas in the text we read.  These are all things good readers do when they read.  We began Unit 3 in Fundations, which works on closed syllable exceptions.  Words that end in ild, old, ost, ind, and olt  and have long vowel sounds are all closed exceptions.

We continued our learning about ants during math this week.  We watched several video clips about ants on Discovery Education, and read and sang poems about ants.  The focus of this week's work was to learn as much as we can about ants before we dive into problem solving focused around ants next week.

We also enjoyed a Hands On Nature lesson about trees on Wednesday.  We learned about the life cycle of trees, tree parts and their purposes.  We talked about deciduous and coniferous trees, photosynthesis and tree growth.  We went outside and made many observations about trees.  A huge thank you to our Hands On Nature parents for helping us learn about trees!

Finally, a quick reminder that the month of October is Walk to School Wednesdays.  Have a great weekend!

Ants, Ants, Ants!

This week we finished Unit 1 in Math.  We joined Miss Niles' class on Tuesday to compare and contrast our Churn Dash Quilt with hers.  We created a Venn Diagram to compare the two.  This led to an interesting discussion about what a square is.  On Wednesday, Mr. Feeley (Mrs. KillKelley's instructor from the Best Practices Math Class) joined our class to teach us about growing patterns.  We learned that we can use the arrangement number in a pattern to help us determine what the pattern will look like.  I was truly amazed by the math understanding of growing patterns my friends had at the end of this lesson.  Today we began Unit 2-"Hungry Ants".  We kicked off the unit by reading "One Hundred Hungry Ants" and created different arrangements of ants.  This is an integrated unit, so we will be spending quite a bit of time learning about ants.  This unit will also connect to our Readers and Writers non-fiction unit we will be working on for the months of October and November.

This week we shared our Bink and Gollie books and talked a lot about ways to fancy up our writing during Writers Workshop. Next week we will talk about the writing process which will include conferring, editing and publishing.  During Readers Workshop we continued to talk about what good readers do and spent time practicing making text to text, text to self, and text to world connections.  We also learned about how good readers ask questions when they read, and spent some time practicing that during this time.  At this time we are using post-it notes to write down our connections and questions while we read.  We have also been enjoying Guided Reading Groups during this time.  We took our Unit 2 Test in Fundations today and will begin Unit 3 on Monday.  I was wowed by how well everyone did on their Unit 2 Test!

This was our last week for our first social studies/science rotation.  Next week Mrs. Nakhleh and I will switch groups and begin a new unit.  Wednesday will be our next Hands On Nature.  Please make sure your child is dressed for the outdoors on Wednesday as we will probably be doing some of our learning outdoors and it is starting to get chilly this time of year. 

 Have a terrific weekend!

Field Trip to Shelburne Farms!

The Firefly Team finished off the month of September enjoying the last two Red Clover books we had left to read- Wonder Horse and Mirror, Mirror.  Today we voted on our favorite and the winner was Born Yesterday.
In Readers Workshop we continued to learn about what good readers do and began Guided Reading Groups.  We practiced our rules for bonus letters (ff, ll, ss) and reviewed glued sounds in Fundations.  In Writer's Workshop we continued to talk about how writers get their ideas and finally finished our Bink and Gollie books.  We spent this afternoon sharing them with our classmates.
We were introduced to six new workstations and created a Churn Dash quilt in math this week.  Next week we will finish up our first unit of the year talking more about growing patterns.  We will begin Unit 2 the following week, which will be an integrated unit called "Hungry Ants".  This unit will focus heavily on problem solving.
Wednesday was Fire Prevention Day.  We had a visit from "Fireman Steve" and "Fireman Brian"-who happens to belong to the KillKelley household.  They taught us about fire safety, helped us crawl through a smokehouse and practice "stop, drop and roll".  We also got a chance to climb into the new Shelburne Firetruck and take a seat.  It was a fun morning for the Firefly Team.
Today we went to Shelburne Farms for a teambuilding field trip.  We spent some time exploring Shelburne Farms and participating in a scavenger hunt, then went to the farmyard in small groups to spend time with the animals.  It was a fun morning for everyone.  A big thank you to our parent chaperones on this trip!

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More Red Clover Books

Firefly Second Grade has spent the week reading more Red Clover books.  This week we read A pig Parade,  Nabeel's New Pants, and Art & Max.  These were all funny stories with beautiful illustrations.  We talked about how author's tell their stories through illustrations.  Art & Max was a perfect book for this discussion.  Next week is the last week our team has the Red Clover books.  We will be reading the last few books and voting on our favorite.

In Reader's Workshop we talked about how readers choose books, reviewed choosing "Just Right Books", reviewed fiction and non-fiction text features, and practiced finding our special quiet place to read during Reader's Workshop.  We will begin reading groups next week.  We reviewed digraphs and blends and ways to make the /k/ sound in Fundations.  We also reviewed closed syllables and took our Unit 1 test.  Next week we will begin Unit 2 which will review bonus letters (ff, ll, ss), glued sounds and vowel teams.

We continued to explore growing patterns during math this week.  We created a growing chart showing "Nostrils".  Yes, that's right, nostrils!  We needed to create a pattern that grew by twos and the class voted on drawing nostrils and counting them since every nose has two of them!  We used this to complete a hundreds grid counting by twos and discovered a variety of patterns that existed on our hundreds charts.  We spent the past two days sorting objects and creating Venn Diagrams showing different ways to sort various objects.

Wednesday was our last day for Imagination Playground.  This was a wonderful experience and gave everyone opportunities to practice some of the social skills and group work skills we have been learning about in the classroom.  Everyone who shared this week did a terrific job of talking about how they have used these skills in their lives.

 

This Wednesday will be Fire Prevention Day and on Friday we will be spending our morning a Shelburne Farms doing team building activities.  We will be back at school in time for recess/lunch.

In my last post I forgot to thank all the parents who helped make Salsa last Friday, so a big thank you to all of you for providing such a fun experience for our class!