NEWS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS:
Welcome to Team Blowey! I, for one, and so excited for this year! I hope you are excited, too!
This space will be updated weekly. My goal is to upload any news and announcements we might have as well as letting you know a little bit about what we are learning about for the week. My hope is that this can be used to spark some conversations at home about what we are learning at school. I confess! I, too, was one of those kids who always went home and gave about two words about my school day. "It was good" or "We didn't really do anything" were two very common phrases that came out of my mouth. However, I think that it would have been a lot easier for me to have a conversation with my parents about what I was learning if they knew a little bit about the specifics of what was going on that week as well. Hence, the creation of this blog! It can't get lost in a crumpled pile in the bottom of a backpack or eaten by the family dog! You can check it at your own leisure and I am always open for any questions, comments, or insights you might have!
Here is our special schedule:
MONDAY: P.E. (Bring those sneakers!)
TUESDAY: Music
WEDNESDAY: Art
THURSDAY: Spanish
FRIDAY: Library (Don't forget those books!)
With an early morning lunch, we will be having snack in the afternoon. Please make sure you send your child to school with a healthy snack to help keep their brains energized for the rest of the day. Please DO NOT send any snacks that contain PEANUTS, STRAWBERRIES, OR PINEAPPLES! This includes juices as well. Thank you for helping us keep our students safe! If you would like some suggestions for healthy snacks, I would be more than happy to send some your way!
Students are permitted to bring water bottles and keep them on their desk throughout the day. However, I do ask that these water bottles contain WATER ONLY!
If you haven't sent your child to school with a two-pocket folder, please send them as soon as possible. These folders will be used as our home-school connection folders and will be used daily. There may be some days where there will be no papers sent home, however, I do ask that the folders always make it to school the next day just in case we need them! If purchasing a folder is a hardship for your family, please let me know! I am more than happy to make some arrangements so that your child has all of the learning tools they need to be successful in second grade!
My hope is to send out a paper version of a newsletter by the end of the month. That newsletter will include information about behavior expectations, positive reinforcement, a picture tour of our classroom, etc. That way you can get a real feel for what it's like in the wonderful world of room 10!
THIS WEEK IN...
Classroom Community: The first six weeks of school will focus primarily on building our classroom community! For this reason, any and all volunteers will begin sometime in October. To let you gain some insight on what we are doing to build our classroom community, here is some information on some of the activities we have been doing.
Morning Meeting: We start every morning with a morning meeting. We begin with a fun greeting that we pick out of our “Good Morning Sunshine!” box. These greetings can be anything from a chant or cheer to a simple friendly handshake. Then, we have time for news and announcements. We each take turns sharing something from our lives that we would like to group to know. We have been telling each other all about our fun summers and what we’re excited about for the year! Then, we have a chance to use our morning meeting board to review some important topics like using a calendar, days of the week, graphing the weather, and tracking the days of school. After calendar time, we read our morning message and sing our school vision. Finally, we end morning meeting by saying the Pledge of Allegiance.
Getting to Know You Activities: We have been playing lots of games and doing lots of fun activities that allow us to get to know some of the new friends that our in our classroom. These activities are incredibly important in building our classroom community! We have a chance to get to know each other, learn to trust each other, and get the true feeling of being a part of a team! Ask your child about playing games like a warm wind blows, octopus, toilet tag, captain's coming, or indian chief. You can even ask them about our second grade survey and our Find-a-Friend activities!
Trading Cards: Since we are Team Blowey, it is only fitting that we each have our very own trading card! This week, students will be creating the information for the back of their trading card. This information might include their name, their favorite subject, or their favorite school memory. Then, we'll take a fun and colorful picture on our playing field (the Russell School playground) for the finishing touch! Once these are completed, they will hang out in the hallway for a few weeks for everyone to check them out and get to know Team Blowey!
Beginning Our Classroom Vision: Our classroom vision will become a central part of our everyday classroom lives. We’ve started by thinking about what would the best year ever in second grade look like. Today, students wrote down things in response to these three questions: What makes a good teacher? What makes a good student? What makes a good classroom? We got responses that varied from a colorful classroom to good listeners. From these responses, we organized them into the following categories: fun, respect, helping, working hard/doing your best, self control, safe, creative, and learning. Later this week, we will vote on four words that we think are the most important to us in making room 10 the best place to be! Once we have our four power words, they will be used to create several drafts of a classroom vision for students to vote on. Once our classroom vision is decided, it will become the center of our classroom, driving everything we do!
Read Alouds: Our read alouds will focus on various desired qualities. On the first day of school, we read Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes. We used this book to remember this phrase, “Before you speak, think and be smart. It’s hard to fix a wrinkled heart.” Basically, we used the book to demonstrate how saying or doing mean things to someone can wrinkle their heart and although we might apologize, we can’t make the heart “unwrinkle” again. The goal is to get Team Blowey to be more aware of how the things they say and do really affect those around them. The next book we read was Have You Filled a Bucket Today? by Carol McCloud. This book uses a bucket to represent the good feelings we have about ourselves. When our buckets are full, we are smiling and happy! When our buckets our empty, we feel sad and lonely. We talked about how when you fill someone’s bucket by saying and doing nice things, your bucket gets filled too! However, when you try to be a “bucket dipper”, you not only “dip” from someone else’s bucket, but you also “dip” from your own bucket. Bucket dipping will never give you a full bucket. Next, we read The Recess Queen where Mean Jean rules the playground, leaving everyone else taking cover! That is, until Mary Sue comes along! Mary Sue's bright and bubbly personality paired with her willingness to include Mean Jean in her recess games turns Mean Jean around and makes for one very happy and fun playground. Team Blowey discussed the power of treating others the way you want to be treated, even when it might be difficult. Respect plays a huge role in everyone's lives! Later this week, we will be listening to Yo! Yes?, a fun story about making new friends. This story is definitely appropriate for the start of a new year, in a new classroom, with new teammates! We'll also be reading Lily's Purple Plastic Purse, a story where Lily just can't wait to share her new purse with everyone in class, even if it's not the best time and interrupts everyone's learning. This book takes a sympathetic look at using self control and following directions, two very important things to remember in second grade. Next, we'll be reading Swimmy, a story that shows how one fish, with ingenuity and teamwork, can overcome any danger.
Daily 5: For those of you who don’t know, the Daily 5 is a program that we use to help us practice our literacy goals. This week, we began practicing and talking about read to self. Students have brainstormed student responsibilities and teacher responsibilities. The students will get started right away, work the whole time, be quiet, build their reading stamina, and stay in one spot. When we talk about stamina, we're talking about doing anything for a long period of time without getting tired or giving up. These will become our expectations for when students practice their read to self time. The teacher might be listening to students read or working with individuals or groups of students. This week, we started building our reading stamina by reading for three minutes at a time. As we keep practicing, we’ll continue to build our stamina to about thirty minutes of focused reading time.
We'll also begin talking about writing. We'll build a chart with the expectations for writing time and begin to build our writing stamina. In order to do this, we need a way to find a topic to write about with ease. This week, we'll be creating heart maps, where students will draw and write different topics that are close to their heart that they may like to write about. For example, my heart map my show my family, the beach, swimming, reading, hiking, or my cat, Daisy. These heart maps will become the cover of our journals, making them very easy to find and helping us save minutes!
As the year progresses, I hope to put up pictures of some of the activities we are doing throughout the week. Pictures really make things come alive!
Please keep in mind that these are tentative plans for the week and may be changed as necessary to meet the needs of Team Blowey!
If you have any questions, comments, or insights about anything you see or read on the blog, please let me know!
I hope you have a wonderful week!
No comments:
Post a Comment