I hope you find some time to enjoy your weekend outdoors.  They say we may get a little snow.  

Today was a full day in room 14.  The students worked on context clues to help build comprehension skills.  We looked at cause and effect.  The class also worked on subtraction with ungrouping.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend and try not to stay up too late on Sunday!

Hello Families,

I'm so happy that our class seems to be much healthier this week than we seen the past week or so.  Keep it up with hand washing and getting enough rest.

Friday is Crazy Clothes Day!  This is a school-wide student council event.

We have been spending a lot of time with grammar skills.  This is tough for many of the children to grasp.  We will continue to practice naming verbs, helping verbs, nouns, proper nouns, pronouns, and more!  You can see we were practicing by building sentences using tiles.  They had fun with this lesson.

Emily's Flat Stanley returned from El Paso, Texas.  The students in the second grade class wrote some friendly letters sharing what they liked about the book and what their city is like.  It was fun to share them with our class.

Math may seem a little challenging for the class right now.  They will grasp it, be patient!  I will always try to spiral past lessons to build comprehension and understanding.

They are loving our reading theme this week.  I'm so pleased with the progress in reading that the students are displaying for me in the classroom.  I hope you are seeing the development at home as well.

If you have any questions or concerns, please let me know.

​Enjoy the evening!

Our week will be filled with how Earth changes!  We are reading about volcanoes, tsunamis, earthquakes, and other causes of erosion.  Take a look at a short video if you are interested in trying to make a tsunami at home. You can also watch the short clip on erosion.  

We started looking at strategies to solve double digit subtraction that will need to be regrouped.  You and I grew up with "borrowing", today we call that "regrouping".  We worked with using place value to count up as one strategy for subtraction.  This is a great way for kids to check their work.  Another strategy we practiced today was expanded form.  We looked at it like money.  If I had 73 cents (7 dimes and 3 pennies) and I spent 59 cents.  We had to trade a dime for ten pennies in order to take the nine cents away.  This then changes to 6 dimes and 13 pennies (60+13).  A paper will come home tomorrow explaining it more and we will continue to practice at school.  Watch for a homework paper tomorrow for the students to practice at home.

We had a Flat Stanley return today and I saw another one for tomorrow.  This is so exciting for the kids, thank you so much for making this homework a priority!  The mapping skills are real for the kids.  

​Our Monday Write and Tell authors did a fantastic job.  Well done!

Friday will be crazy clothes day sponsored by our student council.  

Have a great evening!

Not too much to share out today.  It was a regular day of learning and reviewing in room 14.  

We did some guided highlighting work to build comprehension skills and practice rereading.  We also looked at writing a paragraph more closely to help everyone with their Write and Tells.  It is a great beginning skill to practice the indent to start the writing.  It is also important to have the order of information placed in a way that makes clear sense.  This is where you, as the parent, can help your child see the fluency.  The final draft should not be their rough draft.  A finished product should not have scribbled out lines, crossed of or erased words.  We are working through the writing process together with this important homework.  Trust me, you will see a huge improvement in your child's ability to think for themselves and become an independent writer.

We are using coins to show many different ways to make the same amount.  The children are skip counting quarters, so this is something you can help them with at home.  You can also give them a handful of coins and ask them to add them up.  In addition to coins, we are also looking at different strategies to find the answer (difference) in subtraction with double digit numbers.  Also, with 100.

Those of you coming back to the school tonight for the winter dance, I hope you enjoy the dancing and fun!  

​Have a great weekend!

It has been great getting outside these past few days.  Thank you for sending in all the warm gear for your children to enjoy the outdoor weather.

Today in media center, the children had a chance to work with the robots.  What fun they had, be sure to ask about it!

We celebrated Evan's birthday in class today with an extra recess reward.  

Keep up the great work with Write and Tells!

Tomorrow is our spelling test.  These words are pretty tough.  Please be sure to use the words in sentences while practicing to help build comprehension and meaning.  These silent letters are really tough, so we tend to rely on memorizing skills.

Enjoy the evening.