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.