Reader's Theater

These groups did a great job reading for our class! It is very important to build fluency in 2nd grade, and Reader's Theater does just that! Way to go readers!

Collection Jar

If your child brings home our Counting Collection jar, please read the note inside. We would love to have your child bring a collection from home for us to count at school. This activity builds number sense and helps facilitate increase fluency with math notation. I will also start sending the counting collections journal home so your child can share what we do at school with you that way too. Here are some pics of our work with collections from students' homes so far. The collection is first and the notation we developed together is next. Each cup has 10 things in it.

Cloud Creation!

We learned about the types of clouds from reading books first. Then we went outside and observed them. We took notes as scientists do, drew what we saw, and classified them. Then each group created a cloud to hang in our classroom. They had to use their resources to write the characteristics of each cloud. Their list of characteristics is on the back of the clouds which can't be seen in the picture, but the list is there!

Dry erase boards

If your child asks you for a dry erase board like we use at school, here is a picture. They are $1.50 at Walmart right now and come with a marker with eraser and 2 magnets. These would be great to use at home to practice your child's weekly phonics words (spelling words).

Studying our phonics words!

The words this week are into, went, they, said, and with. This is one way we reviewed them at school. Please help your child study weekly. You can get a dry erase board from Walmart for $2 right now and have your child practice spelling the words nightly. Also, every word we study will be tested that week and could appear on any future quiz. We are studying this researched list in order to help kids build a strong base of words they know automatically for reading and writing purposes. 

Mr. Jason visited our class!

Mr. Jason Suel from the Walton Arts Center and Trike Theater visited our class to continue our work with arts integrated education. We worked on cooperation challenge as well as tableaus. They created tableaus of rockets then one called "our day at the beach". The kids did an awesome job!

                       A rocket ship

       Cooperating to create a tableau

Here we have a tableau of a clam, water, a fish, octopus, and a tree.

               Overall class tableaus

BOOK ORDERS

Don't forget book orders are due Wednesday 9/4. You can return the flyer with the books marked and with payment by 9/4 or you can order online at scholastic.com by Wednesday using the class activation code J367F. Ordering books from the book order is an easy and inexpensive way to build your child's home library, key to raising a reader! Also, every book you order gives bonus points to be used for our own classroom library: a win-win! Please let me know if you order online. Thanks!

Creating Tableau

Our arts integrated education has already begun. Last October we earned national recognition in Parents magazine as one of the top ten most innovative schools in America for this approach. Teachers attend a weeklong AWE (arts with education) institute then go back to their rooms and institute the techniques which include "signing" a contract to control our body, voice, and imagination and to use cooperation and concentration. Then we move on to build our concentration through games like concentration circle. We also work on cooperation by completing various cooperation challenges. I will try to post more pics of those things so you get an idea of what that all means. Here today though are some pictures of our first attempt at tableau. In tableau (which means frozen picture), the students have to use all their skills of cooperation and concentration to build a frozen picture of something with their team. This is used in content instruction to assess and also to extend their understanding in a kinesthetic way. Right now, we are working on successfully making a tableau with our team and sharing them with each other. We also are going to be visited by guest teaching artists in the next week to practice these skills. The directions for this one were to make a picture of something they liked about summer. To extend this we will continue practicing working together and also include high, medium, and low levels in our tableau.

This group made starfish.

 This group made an apple.

 This group made an airplane.

Please post supportive comments! I would love to share them with my students so they see that others are looking at our blog and are interested in what we do at school. Thanks for taking the time to read it!

Counting Collections

Right now, we are building our understanding of numbers, number groupings, counting, and working with a partner. We are also working on correctly writing numbers to and over 100, number sentences, and completing our work.