January 23rd-January 27th

Apologies for the late blog update!  Better late than never!

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Students earned a BINGO!  Their reward is a glow in the dark party.  A lime green reminder will go home with the students tomorrow (Thursday).  It will be on Friday, February 3rd.

Calling all t-shirts!  Some students still need to bring in a white t-shirt to make our team jerseys.  Once all students have brought in a t-shirt, we will be able to make them.  (Special thanks to parents who have sent in extras and supplies!  It is a HUGE help!)

Book buddies will be happening next week, Monday, January 30th.  It is an early release day.  Our big buddies will be coming to Russell School for a fun "persuasive" activity as well as some buddy reading!  We are definitely very excited to see our buddies again!

This week in...

Reading:  We will be reading a photo essay called Splish! Splash! Animal Baths.  Together we will work to generate questions while we read.  Asking questions is a great way to help us understand what we are reading!  We will also be talking about what it means to compare and contrast.  Using the animals in the book, we will work on comparing and contrasting the ways that different animals bathe themselves.  

Vocabulary:  Our vocabulary words this week are:  itches, puddles, preen, beasts, handy, and nibble.  We worked together to talk about what the words mean and also how to use them in a sentence.  A huge part of our vocabulary time is also working with our elbow buddies and making connections with each of the words.  The greater connection a student has with something, the more they will be able to retain it and use it!

Phonics:  This week focuses on r-controlled vowels such as /ar/ and /or/.  Together we practiced words like:  part, start, park, farm, dark sort, storm, short, for, and horse.  We then sorted these words into the two groups:  /ar/ and /or/.  We also worked to use these sounds to build new words such as car, star, or fork.

Grammar:  We will be doing an activity together about capitalizing proper nouns.  For example, the name of a day, month, or holiday should begin with a capital letter.

Writing:  We are working on a really fun project at the moment!  We are writing persuasive letters.  Some students chose to write to their parents, some chose to write to me, and some chose something entirely different.  Examples of letters:  getting tickets to a Celtics game, getting a puppy, being allowed to stay up later at night. 

Here is the fun letter Team Blowey worked together to write.  We chose to write to Mr. Joseph and tell him that the second graders should really be in charge at Russell School.  Enjoy!

Dear Mr. Joseph,

We think second graders should be in charge.  We have very convincing information that will blow your mind!  Here are the top three reasons why this is the best idea you’ve ever heard!

First, if you put second graders in charge you won’t have to work so much.  If you don’t have to work so much, you’ll have more time to spend with your family and your friends.   You might even be able to go on a vacation with them.  You could even go to Las Vegas!  There are some really cool attractions there that your family will love!

Second, if you put kids in charge you won’t have to deal with punishing kids anymore.  We think you might need a break from it.  We know how much you do not like to punish kids so we will do it for you.  When kids don’t show green or blue behavior there needs to be consequences.  When kids need consequences, we will take away their recess and call their parents.

Third, second graders are very responsible students.  We have shown this to you because we do not drop our lunch trays in the cafeteria.  We know how to be quiet in the hallway.  We know to how to act here at Russell School.  The second graders are role models and can teach the other students what to do. 

We think that second graders can be in charge because you can count on us!

Sincerely,

Team Blowey

Math:  We have been working hard at meeting our money standard!  We are still counting money in our Team Blowey piggy bank at morning meeting as well as talking about different strategies for counting money (including using skip counting and place value).  We have also been playing math games to help us add money together and also how to use $ and ¢ appropriately.  If that wasn't enough, we've also been hard at work trying to solve some money word problems!  We've been talking about pulling out the powerful facts in a word problem that will help us solve it.  It's pretty tricky, but we've really been working hard!

Science:  Students are continuing to document the change to their brassica plants in their plant journals.  We've seen some pretty exciting changes with some of the leaves lately!  We've also seen that sometimes in nature, not everything has the chance to grow.  We'll be having some conversations very soon about all of our observations and how they might be similar or different when compared to the observations of our teammates.

Read Aloud:  We began an all new read aloud book this week.  It happens to be my FAVORITE children's book, Sideways Stories from Wayside School.  When we finish this wacky book, we'll have a wacky writing project to go along with it!  That's all I will say for now!  I don't want to ruin any surprises.  

Other News...

In order to help some students with proper playground behavior, Mrs. Sylvester and I decided to get our classes together for a special lesson.  Tomorrow (Thursday)  we will be talking to students about what recess should look like.  We will also be incorporating some of our panther paws!  When we've have finished the mini lesson with students, they will have a chance to practice what they learned when we have a shared recess at the end of the day.  Students who are caught being successful will earn panther paws!

This ties in perfectly with the read aloud book we just finished.  In The Hundred Dresses by Eleanor Estes, there is a girl who is very rude and teases the main character, Wanda.  However, there is another character in the book who doesn't say anything at all.  She's not mean to Wanda but she also doesn't tell her friend that what she is doing is wrong and she doesn't tell a grown up either.  Team Blowey had a lot of conversations about how not doing anything at all is just as bad as being the person who is saying hurtful things.  When you let someone bully others, you are just as much as a bully yourself.  Together we talked about what to do if you were put in that situation and how the characters should have handled themselves differently.  We also talked about what might have happened in the book if the characters had made good choices for themselves instead.  Hopefully the lesson with Mrs. Sylvester's class will really solidify some of the things we learned from The Hundred Dresses but also gives a chance to really show what great teammates we can be!

I hope you all have a fabulous week!