Tuesday Tales

Busy day that began with a visit to the library.  Mrs. Swan read a Monarch Book:  POP! - a book about the invention of bubble gum.  Fun and informative!

We read Butterfly's Dream today looking closer at the text.  We looked at what the main character (Bella) did, what she thought, and what she felt as we read.

During Writers' Workshop we began a new unit on writing responses to literature.  Today was the pre-assessment and tomorrow we will start diving in.

Math Workshop focused on place value, math facts, and counting different values of coins.

We also enjoyed a reading by K.C. of  Father Bear's surprise!

Don't forget we have a visit from Nature Dan on Thursday.  Sunday, October 28 at 3:00 meet me and Mrs. Perrone at the Bartlett Library.

Monday Marvels

After Monday morning specials, we began the day with a news report by Victor:

Great news reporting, Victor!

We are learning to dig deeper into text as we read The Butterfly's Dream. We are learning how readers look closely at the characters by what they do, say, and think.  We will continue this on Tuesday.

Today in math workshop we working on place value and math facts.

We also enjoyed Patrick as he read to the class One Piece Missing.

We will have a visit from Nature Dan (Bartlett Nature Center) on Thursday for Wacky Weather!  It will be GREAT!!!

We had originally planned to go to South Elgin High School to see a presentation of The Lorax.  Due to transportation issues, this will not be possible.  We are going to schedule an additional visit by Nature Dan at a later date for another offering from the Bartlett Nature Center that will coincide with our science standards.

Don't forget to return the conference request form and the signed progress reports.  Dates are filling up fast!

Schedule Change

There has been a change in plans for our in school field trip. Because Nature Dan from the Bartlett Nature Center is unable to talk to us about weather, we have decided to reschedule until he is available. That's how GREAT he is!!! Instead he will visit all the 2nd grade classrooms next week. The exact day and time will be discussed among the teachers, but Thursday will be a regular school day.

 We are continuing to learn about characters and character traits. Thursday we will be making a list of a variety of character traits what we have learned about.

We are also illustrating our personal narratives and writing about how we got our names. Thank you for completing the homework assignments on time.

In math we continue to learn about fact families, doubles, and the +1/-1 strategy. We are also working on problem solving and explaining our thinking, math vocabulary, and more!!!

Weekly News

Wouldn't you know it! I want to start posting pictures and videos of kids at work and my camera died on me this week...right in the middle of a recording I was making of Kendall reading. And....can't even upload to my laptop the pictures that I had already taken...dead as can be! So, until I can get a new camera...we will all have to visualize!!! Good practice for all GREAT readers! We had a busy week as we are learning about character traits. We have learned that we have to look at what they say, what they do, and what they think. We are using our last read aloud (Gooney B. Greene) and our new one, My Rotten Red-Headed Brother by Patricia Polocco. When we finish we will have a list of character traits we can use in our writing and reading. But....that's just the tip of the iceberg as we dig deeper into text. Common Core State Standards are all about digging deeper. Although I know EXACTLY what reading reading level each child in my classroom is at, reading levels aren't important when we start digging deeper. So, if you child brought a book home this week and you are thinking "they read every word without a single mistake" -that's great. It's the comprehesion beyond the literal level we are working on. Students also finished up writing personal narratives and we will start the publishing piece next week. If I can get a camera quickly we will be able to record them reading their stories as well. In math we continue to work on math facts and strategies for learning math facts. Yes----students MUST know their math facts to 20 fluently by the end of the year, and I have a benchmark assessmet of how accurate and quickly can they do them right now. BUT----ACCURACY is the key to being fast. I am backtracking with some of the students to make sure they understand how numbers come together and how they come apart to help with number sense. Accuracy MUST come first so I do not focus on time right now. It's ACCURACY first...speed later. Xtramath.org focuses more on speed at times, so if your child is not accurate use the Everyday Math games first! If you child can be accurate but just goes slow...use the games first and then XtraMath.org. Understanding leads to accuracy and that is first! Progress reports will go home on Tuesday, along with MAP scores and a sign up for conference sheet. Please indicate on the sign up a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd choice. I will do my best to accomadate as many 1st choices as I can, but DO give me 3 choices. It will be first come..first served....so get those back ASAP! Looking forward to hearing what everybody read over the long weekend! Happy Reading!

Our first post!!!

All permission slips are in so we will start using the blog to communicate classroom news. Soon I hope to have students writing many of the posts, but for now... On Friday we had our first Mystery Reader: Allison's mom!

Allison was so surprised as well as the rest of the class. If you would like to be a Mystery reader...just let me know!

Friday was also our field trip to the U-46 Planetarium. We learned a lot about our place in space. Friday was another day of firsts: David was the first child of the day to read to the class. He read Creepy Crawlies.

This week we also participated in the O.R.E.O. Cookie project. We estimated how many cookies we could each stack and then had two attempts to stack the cookies as high as we could. Nadia was our top stacker with 30 cookies! We also caluculated the mean, median, and mean of all the results. On Thursday we had a cookie "stack-off" where Nadia competed against students in our hallway. Nadia did a great job and came in second. We are also comparing our results with classrooms across the country. In mid October we will analyze the data collected from all the schools. Enjoy the pictures.

We also had our first Word Watchers and they are well on their way to being Word Wizards! Congratulations Lily, Alyssa, and Patrick!!

Quick Note

We will NOT be meeting at the library today.

Library Booktalk!

Tomorrow's the BIG day! Meet me in the children's department at Bartlett Library at 3:00. We'll share what we are reading...look for some GREAT new books and just have a GREAT time looking at all the wonderful books! Can't wait to see everyone!