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!