- Tammy's Week 33, May 14th-18th
Week 33
May 14th-18th
Important Things and Events
We do NOT need parent volunteers for Thursday as the children worked really hard today and we are almost done publishing. Yippee!
Our Curriculum Celebration will be on Friday, May 18th from 5PM-7PM in the A-Wing space.
Please put Thursday, June 7th on your calendar for the A9 Parent Breakfast. We meet and eat from 7:45-8:30 with a slide show at 8:30. Preschool-aged siblings are welcome.
I am very behind on getting student work back via Friday Folders and I apologize. Hopefully, that wicked virus has left my house and my boys’ sports schedules will settle down this week!
- May 18th: Curriculum Celebration
- May 22nd: Spring Concert (It’s on a TUESDAY this year!)
- May 28th: No school: Memorial Day
- Friday, June 1st: PE Play Day
- Thursday, June 7th: A9 parent breakfast
- Friday, June 8th: Last day—Half day!
Spelling Schedule:
May 14th: Test, lesson for the week then test on May 21st
May 21st: Test, lesson for the week and final spelling test for the year on Friday, May 25th.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
We’ve had some unique experiences with solving problems around playground equipment and a long-standing battle with pencil sharpeners. Some things we’ve learned from these experiences:
*It’s better to wait until you’re calm to write or talk about the problem
*Studying the problem to find out what is really happening is helpful
*The more specifically you can define the problem, the better
*There is a time, a place and a manner in which to express your frustration
*Finding the right person to help you solve the problem is a good idea
Reading
We are using the reading skill of “’reread” or “read carefully” as we write and publish this week. Going back and rereading what students wrote is not their favorite thing to do, but we’re working on using this skill more carefully. During this careful, overall reading and look at our writing, we often find words that need an s or that we used the wrong way or we find a better way to say something.
Writing
With publishing on the agenda this week, I have been doing a lot of editing with the students. It’s often a fine line between making the writing correct, or the best it can be, and keeping the voice of the individual student. While I will always edit for spelling, capitalization, punctuation and basic grammar, sometimes I let the stylistic things slide in favor of not changing the student’s voice.
Math
We will be diving into story problems again this week, both solving them and writing them. When a student can write a story problem for a specific operation, it usually shows that she or he has fully internalized this concept. Knowing this, it is no surprise that writing division story problems is the hardest type! 2nd graders are focusing on addition and subtraction and 3rd graders on multiplication and division. While we focus some on the key words on each operation (find the difference, how many in each box, how many in all), I also want children to be able to visualize and think about what operation makes the most sense. I also have children write the equation as they solve word or story problems. You will see this on the homework this week!
Science, Social Studies and Miscellaneous
Our field trip to Hudson Mills was a great introduction to many of the plant concepts we will dive into next. One thing I have students do is dissect different flowers to find specific plant parts. If you have extra flowers in your garden, or having a bouquet that is fading, we’d love to use these (starting NEXT week!) in our classroom.
- Spelling for the Week of May 14-21st
Please note: The test will be taken on Monday, May 21st. Our last spelling test will be on May 25th.
Salli’s List:
Tammy’s List:
Mary’s List:
- Tammy's Week 32, May 7th-14th
Week 32
May 7th-11th
Important Things and Events
Thank you for all the fruit donations!
We are in need of some parent volunteers on Thursday, May 10th and 17th from 1:30-3:00. We have the computer lab and will be typing, editing and formatting all of the animal reports! This is a new skill for many of the 2nd graders, so extra hands are welcome! You can let me know you’re coming or just appear that afternoon.
Please put Thursday, June 8th on your calendar for the A9 Parent Breakfast. We meet and eat from 7:45-8:30 with a slide show at 8:30. Preschool-aged siblings are welcome.
- May 11th: Field Trip to Hudson Mills Metropark
- May 18th: Curriculum Celebration
- May 22nd: Spring Concert (It’s on a TUESDAY this year!)
- May 28th: No school: Memorial Day
- Friday, June 1st: PE Play Day
- Thursday, June 7th: A9 parent breakfast
- Friday, June 8th: Last day—Half day!
Spelling Schedule:
Monday, May 7th: Lesson as usual, but take the test on May 14th.
May 14th: Test, lesson for the week then test on May 21st
May 21st: Test, lesson for the week and final spelling test for the year on Friday, May 25th.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
Thursday, May 10th is Move-Up Day. Our 3rd graders go visit the 4-5 classrooms and the 1st graders visit us. This is usually a pretty exciting day for everyone! If your child is feeling unusually nervous about next year’s transitions, please let me know.
I am also looking for any advice 2-3 parents have for the incoming K-1 parents. Mary, Salli and I may be sending out an email to new parents later this spring or in the summer. We can always use firsthand experience to help with this big transition.
Science, Social Studies, Reading, Writing and Math
We are adding more pages to our animal books each week. Each page helps sum up a skill(s) that children have been learning this year. We’re using measurement and graphing concepts to make scaled drawings, finding our animal’s habitat on a world map, writing parts of speech poetry and more! Just today all children finished the first draft of their reports and we have added introductions and conclusions. Later this week, we’ll get out our blue pens for revision and editing and then we will publish.
Last week we came upon several examples of onamotopea and idioms, so we have been exploring and playing with figurative language. We will also begin to look at simple, compound and complex sentences as a whole class. 2nd graders need to just understand the first two, while 3rd graders should start to add the idea of complex sentences to their writing.
Many children are noticing huge jumps in their timed-math scores and are excited and proud of their progress!
- Spelling Lists: Week of May 7-14th
Please note: Due to the upcoming field trip, the spelling test will be taken on Monday, May 14th.
Salli’s Spelling Group:
Tammy’s Spelling Group:
Mary’s Spelling Group:
- Week 31 with Tammy
Week 31
April 30-May 1
Important Things and Events
Our fruit bowl has been empty all month (except for the PTO week).
The spelling schedule will change for the rest of the year due to activites, trips and busy schedules. Here’s how it will work:
Monday, May 7th: Lesson as usual, but take the test on May 14th.
May 14th: Test, lesson for the week then test on May 21st
May 21st: Test, lesson for the week and final spelling test for the year on Friday, May 25th.
- May 4th: Half day-dismissal is at 12:00
- May 7th: Earth Day (rescheduled)
- May 11th: Field Trip to Hudson Mills Metropark
- May 18th: Curriculum Celebration
- May 22nd: Spring Concert (It’s on a TUESDAY this year!)
- May 28th: No school: Memorial Day
- Friday, June 1st: PE Play Day
- Wednesday, June 6th: Tentative date for A9 parent breakfast
- Friday, June 8th: Last day—Half day!
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
Every spring, the same phenomena happens in classrooms across the country—large groups of children would prefer to socialize rather than do classroom activities. So, we’ve been talking about talking lately. I do give them times throughout the day when they can chat with friends. When it gets really intrusive, I will ask that certain pairs or trios of children not work together for a few days or even weeks. The term we use when this happens is “velcro partners.”
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
We were excited when the school purchased several balls and frisbees for each level of children! The 2/3 students have a locker for their items and a system of pictures and equipment managers from each class to help keep track of playground equipment. Don’t feel you have to purchase anything, but if you do run across extra balls, jump ropes, sand buckets, shovels or sidewalk chalk (even over the summer) keep us in mind as a donation site!
Many students are still amazed that humans are actually animals! This concept was reinforced as we learned more about cold and warm-blooded animals. While reading Jean Craighead George’s books, we’re learning about the many different adaptations animals and plants make to survive in their environments. We’ll use these great books to easily swing from animals to a deeper study of plants in the next few weeks.
Our class is in love with the science books by Simon Basher. They are full of great information, humorous and at a good reading level for this aged children. I’ve asked Marion to have them at the next Nicola’s book fair.
Reading
A lot of our reading last week was centered around our animal research. Children are still reading books they choose during Read-to-Self time. While I still check in and read with them periodically, a lot of my instruction time has been diverted to helping with the research. It has been wonderful to see the stamina they are building and how their books choices reflect more mature reading levels, yet still fit with their personalities and preferences.
We can’t wait to read the PaleoJoe book the STEM committee bought us after we finish One Day in the Desert!
Writing
Reports, reports, reports! As we begin taking our notes and turning them into sentences, we are focusing on writing good sentences and using paragraphs. The skill of writing in paragraphs is abstract and one of the more difficult 3rd grade objectives we have to teach them. Still, we soldier on and notice everywhere we see writers using paragraphs and how this helps the reader.
Math
Math last week and this week will be a mix of fractions, operations and things related to our animal books we are making. Students will use measurement, graphing and story problems in their animal books to show mastery of these subjects.
We’ve covered everything in our required math curriculum this year. This is the time when I start checking in and reviewing what we’ve done this year as well as make sure students are extra strong in the operations and facts required at each grade level. 2nd graders are focusing on subtraction facts and regrouping (carrying and borrowing) with at least two, 2-digit numbers. 3rd graders should have multiplication facts mastered, be starting to use multiplication to solve division problems and be able to multiply 1-digit numbers by powers of 10 and 100 (4×90, 3×900, etc).
Week 18
January 17th-20th
Important Things and Events
Please remember to pick up your child’s playground project as soon as possible. The written articles will come home in Friday folders.
If you are able, please send in a dollar bill with your child, the newer the better. I’ll have some nice, crisp ones to trade, so don’t make a special trip to the bank. This will come home this week or next in an origami form. We’ll be using this lesson to practice reading directions and the concept of symmetry. The dollar bill isn’t necessary, but it does make it more interesting!
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
I cannot emphasis enough the importance of students being responsible for their own materials and routines. It was very clear which children do well with this and which ones struggle as I have watched them build their playgrounds over the last few weeks. Some children were constantly looking for parts, rebuilding because of a lost structure and frustrated because he or she could not find what they needed.
There is a lot of nature/nurture in this area, too. Some children are born ready to organize their things. With these children, we simply fine tune their skills. Other children struggle from birth (I have one of these at home!) to keep track of belongings. It is our job as parents and teachers to support, teach more and keep adding layers of responsibility for these youngsters.
Reading
Many of our classmates were frustrated at the lack of read to self time last week. We’ll get back to the normal schedule and continue to build stamina for reading this week. Students will also reflect on their favorite book so far this year and review the literacy elements of setting, characters and plot as each child starts an in-class project about a great fiction book.
We spent a lot of time creating a nonfiction article about each child’s playgrounds last week. Hopefully, the idea that nonfiction text features like diagrams, photos, captions, illustrations, maps, etc help convey information to readers was reinforced through this project.
Writing
The whole process of writing our playground articles was a great chance for students to see what constitutes a paragraph. For each new structure, students literally started on a separate sheet of paper. We will continue to build on the paragraph concept throughout the remainder of the year.
Publishing our articles for the audience of the Curriculum Celebration was also a great tool to teach the idea of presentation. We don’t publish that often, because when we do, the 2/3 teachers are committed to having students put forth the most “correct” writing they can. Yes, errors slip through the cracks, but students learn that when others outside our classroom will read our writing, we work hard to make it the best (in terms of grammar, spelling, written mechanics and neatness) that we can.
All students’ spelling list feature contractions this week, so we will dive into this topic with more depth this week.
We finished the lower and upper case alphabets in our handwriting unit! 3rd grade students will start to do more in cursive and we will still periodically practice handwriting throughout the year. What this does mean is more time for specific lessons in grammar, parts of speech of some of those other pesky writing conventions.
Math
Our playground project gave students a wonderful chance to use some measurement concepts. We will continue to build on the ideas of perimeter and area throughout the year, but almost everyone is adept at using grade-level measurements of distance.
Over the next few weeks, we will practice measuring mass in grams, work with geometric plane and solid figures and start to explore fractions.
Some families are glad to see the printed math worksheets coming home or specific math assignments. Based on this feedback, I am going to try to send home a specific math homework assignment every other week. Please let me know if you have thoughts on this! If you are not sure what to do, please continue to work on addition, subtraction, multiplication and division facts for speed and accuracy.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
You won’t see or here anything this week in science or social studies as I am still doing assessments for report cards, we are reflecting on our playground projects and getting back into our “normal” routines.
Week 17
January 9th-13th
Important Things and Events
Homework sheets, spelling words and a specific math assignment went home today in planners. Friday folders will start again this Friday, January 13th.
The students have been busy creating landforms and structures for their playgrounds, but we have not attached them to the bases yet. Once we start attaching, storing these gets tricky. So, Wednesday, January 11th is the Great Glue Day and we could use some help. If you have a hot-glue gun or can help with hot-gluing from 1:30-2:30 on Wednesday, please let me know!
January 13th: 5:00PM-7:00PM is our Curriculum Celebration. The 2/3s will have their displays in the A-wing center space.
January 16th: No School
********************
Expect the normal blog format again next week! I apologize for the brevity, but with Curriculum Celebration and report cards due soon, this teacher is swamped.
The week before break was pretty full with cooking and working on our playground projects. Our pizza dough turned out fabulous and we learned that we have to be patient, step away and when we come back, some things are easier (like stretching out pizza dough!). Many thanks to Shellee and Trish Gearheart, who stepped in to help with stretching and shaping dough at the last minute.
This week our main focus will be finishing our playground projects. My being out sick and lunch preparations put us behind where I wanted to be at this point, so the kids know it’s build, build, build, write , write, write (and produce a nonfiction article) this week. You’ll get to see the final projects on Friday.
Happy New Year!
Week 16
December 19th-22nd
Important Things and Events
We will be making our own lunch for Thursday, December 22nd. Thank you if you have already signed up at signupgenius.com. If not, I think this link http://www.signupgenius.com/go/20F0F4FAAA92FA64-2011 will get you there. Each child will make his or her own pizza and I suspect that with all the excitement of the day, many children will bring home leftovers. It would be wise to check backpacks that day and not leave them in the car or hallway like sometimes happens at my house! If you remember to send in a plastic container for your child’s leftovers, that would be helpful, too.
The spelling lists are posted for the first week in January if your child wants to get a head start studying.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
One tenet in Love and Logic that I have gotten better at over the year is the idea of using enforceable statements. We (the adults and parents) set limits by stating what we will do or allow. “You need to put that laundry away tonight” is turned into “I do laundry for children who put their laundry away in a timely manner.” In the classroom it sounds more like “I am happy to listen to you when your voice is calm,” or “I give more book choices to students who can sit and read the whole time.” It’s a weird little twist in our adult behavior, but it really does decrease the battles and make your relationship with your child or student happier. Check out the following link for more examples: http://www.loveandlogic.com/pages/enforceable.html. PS—I am doing a lot less laundry at my house at the moment!
Reading
If you saw snowflakes on the walls at the Winter Concert, those were made by our 2/3 class. We read a book followed the directions and used all of the text features to help us understand how to craft a snowflake. When children had questions, I had them look back in the book. I got the evil eye for suggesting this to some youngsters, but all students were eventually able to use rereading as a powerful comprehension strategy.
All of the children are enjoying The People of Sparks. There are some more mature themes in the book . . the people have plagues and wars in their history and there will be a fire later in the book, but the 2/3 teachers feel the content is managable. In addition, this book creates amazing discusions that tie in with our theme of communities and also touch on social justice.
Writing
PIES—Authors write to Persuade, Inform, Entertain and Share feelings. We do have a lot of acronyms in our writing instruction. MARS is the one we use for revision (Move it, Add it, Remove it, Subsitute it) and today one of the students asked me if I was going to “mars” the piece of writing I was doing for the class.
We dove in and wrote a paragraph to inform our readers about one of the playground structures the students are making. This was our first class attempt at writing nonfiction and it went very well. It was also a very concrete example of a what makes a paragraph-a group of sentences that are all about the same thing.
Math
Besides continuing with perimeter and area, which bridges measurement and geometry nicely, we will continue to do lots of things with shapes. We have started a geometry dictionary and have added point, line and polygon. Students are also getting a lot of experience with plane (2D) and solid (3D) figures while building their playgrounds. Many of the things we will do in the next few weeks in math may not look like “math”. These activities are deliberate as 2nd and 3rd graders need a lot of experience with creating and deconstructing shapes to understand the goals in this strand of math. These explorations also bridge nicely into fractions, which we will begin in late January.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
As students are building their playgrounds, we are having a lot of great discussions about how people interact with their environment in both positive and negative ways, the ways communities use land and how human behavior has shaped the Earth’s surface.
Week 15
December 12th-16th
Important Things and Events
Concerts and weekends and holidays, oh my! With all of the projects and special events in the next two weeks, we’re working hard on still remembering that we’re in school!
There is another specific homework assignment for math this week, involving measuring perimeter (2nd grade) or perimeter and area (3rd) at home. We went over this on Friday and it is printed on the homework sheet that was in your child’s Friday Folder.
December 15th will be our Winter Concert and Holiday Craft Fair. We are shopping at 8:30 AM this Thursday. Your child is welcome to bring money in to shop and support the HC/HP programs.
Because of our dress rehearsal for the concert happens during our swim time, we will swim on Friday this week. Many thanks to Kristin for making this happen.
To celebrate all of the things we’ve learned in 2011, we will be making and eating our own lunch in our classroom on Thursday, December 22nd. Look for an email soon from Signupgenius.com to help contribute food items. The children suggested the menu of pizza, fruit salad, egg nog and chocolate chip cookies. Some of their food suggestions made me smile: one little guy wanted pizza with mashed potatoes, one child suggested the entire menu be popcorn and pasta and another darling wanted an entree of mango, a side of mango, mango nectar to drink and dried mango for dessert! If your child does not like part of our menu, he or she will have a chance to visit the cafeteria and return to eat with us or they may bring a lunch from home.
There will be no spelling groups, math groups, spelling test or homework for the short week of December 19th. We have full days of school through December 22nd.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
We had a long talk today in class about being responsible for our classroom tools, supplies, coats, papers, etc. At this point in the year, Mary, Salli and I are increasing the “fines” for lost items and giving fewer and fewer reminders about picking things up. Children who aren’t used to taking care of their own things at home have a much harder time in the 2/3 classrooms. 2nd and 3rd graders are completely capable of carrying their own planners, snack bags, coats, etc. While it takes longer as a parent to orchestrate the children doing these things, the beginning of a new year is a great time to see where you can layer in just a bit more responsibility for your child.
Reading
Honey Creek has children that are amazingly creative. A phenomenon I notice year after year is that when reading or responding to reading, some children are so skilled in creatively using prior knowledge and context information, they don’t look back at the text to support their opinions. So, we are learning to use the text as evidence for our predictions, inferences, thoughts and summaries. I get chills when I hear a student say, “I’ll prove it. . .turn to page XX>”
(This is a repeat, but it’s important!) After weeks of reminding and cajoling, students are reaching for and reading just right books almost all of the time. Some children are needing a push and a prod to read these books from beginning to end. A few of my apprentices still want to read a little of this, a little of that and so on throughout reading workshop. If at all possible and developmentally appropriate, please encourage your child to do her or his homework reading in the same fashion.
Writing
We are taking a break with a lot of our writing this week to focus energy on projects related to the concert and our playgrounds.
When it comes to studying spelling, much of the research says that children’s brains seek patterns. Salli and I often use a sorting sheet with the spelling words in our groups. Today, in my spelling group, students sorted words that all had the vowel sound in /bird/ and found that sometimes it’s spelled /ir/, /or/, /ur/, /ear/ or /er/. We further cemented the learning by making little phrases . . .a worm is worth the world, or doing silly drawings involving a girl, a bird, birthday cake, shirt and a circle. These are things your child can do on his or her own that may make learning spelling words easier.
Math
What do snow-people have to do with math? They have volume! Take a look at our snow creatures we created when you watch the concert on Thursday.
We are also learning about making snowflakes (by reading nonfiction text, of course!) and will use the shapes in these to start talking about geometry.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
The glue, paper, craft sticks and pipe cleaners will be flying as children start actually building their playgrounds this week. In the past, children have come up with wonderful ideas that need different supplies, so don’t be surprised in your student is scrounging around the house for paper tubes, boxes, etc. in the next two weeks.
Week 14
December 5th-9th
Important Things and Events
I can’t believe I forgot to thank all of the parents that sent in supplies for and helped out at our City of Ember/Thanksgiving/Friendship Feast on November 23rd. We had a great time and practiced so many skills.
There is a specific homework assignment for math this week, related to measuring. I ran out of time to fully explain it on Friday, forgot about it on Monday and will be out of the building for most of Tuesday. Yikes! I will go over it in detail on Wednesday, but if your child has trouble completing it, he or she may turn in it next Friday. If you go to this website, http://superteacherworksheets.com/measure-in-ft-yd.html, and then go to the Measurement Project link, you will see what I sent home.
We have been sewing in preparation for our craft fair. This went really well, but we would love some more adult help Wednesday (1:30-2:30) and Thursday (2:00-3:00)of this week, December 7th and 8th. If you have patience, a sense of humor and can thread a needle, come join us!
There also is a book order from Scholastic, due on December 12th, that was sent home on Friday, December 2nd. You may also order online and will receive an email with more specific information later this week.
December 15th will be our Winter Concert and Holiday Craft Fair.
There will be no spelling groups, math groups, spelling test or homework for the short week of December 19th. We have full days of school through December 22nd.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
While I want my students and children to think creatively most of the time, there is also a time to follow the rules and read the directions! When we play certain math games, learn a new board game or play soccer on the playground, I always insist that the children learn the “universal” or “correct” way of playing each game according to the written rules. Once all participants are familiar with the structure and rules of the activity, variations can be derived.
The 2/3s have had some conflict on the soccer field in the last week or so involving rules and sportsman ship (sportspersonship?), so Mary, Salli and I have had to review some of these previously mentioned items.
Reading
We are still doing books clubs and small groups, but A9ers are also working diligently on the comprehension skills of summarizing and inferencing. I always know when a strategy is internalized when I start to hear, “Hey, that was an inference!” or “Wow, I think I could summarize this,” outside of our normal reading times. Yay!
After weeks of reminding and cajoling, students are reaching for and reading just right books almost all of the time. Some children are needing a push and a prod to read these books from beginning to end. A few of my apprentices still want to read a little of this, a little of that and so on throughout reading workshop. Reading a longer book from beginning to end has many, many benefits. If at all possible and developmentally appropriate, please encourage your child to do her or his homework reading in the same fashion.
Writing
Verbs, nouns and nerbs, oh my! Students are really getting good at identifying these parts of speech. In addition, we have been looking at picture books and how authors vary their sentences. My husband thinks this is just a good excuse to buy more picture books, but we can learn a lot by applying our writing lessons to great, picture-book literature. 
One of our 2nd grade students was heard today mumbling, “I know a good story needs a great problem and solution, but I don’t know how to start!”. It made my heart sing!
Math
We are taking our measuring of length and applying it to perimeter and area. Try to throw in these terms at the dinner table and see what your child can do! We usually try to find the perimeter of polygons and the area of squares and rectangles at this age.
Polygons . . . yes, that means geometry. We’ll finally jump into this unit this week and start to look at what is a polygon (a closed figure made up of straight lines) and how we classify polygons.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
We started brainstorming and designing our creative playgrounds last week and will continue this week. Students spent some computer time looking at images of playgrounds, talked about natural and human-made structures on playgrounds and put our pencils to the paper. While designing their own playgrounds, students are also asked to make sure their design meets the needs of our Honey Creek/High Point/Gretchen’s House community.
Week 13
November 28th-December 2nd
Important Things and Events
It is time to dig out the box of mittens, hats and scarves if you have not done so already. Once the temperature drops below 40 degrees, we ask that children wear hats and mittens. Since we don’t want to share these items, please make sure your child has them each day.
December 15th will be our Winter Concert and Holiday Craft Fair.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
While adults are usually good at breaking down a task like tying shoes in order to teach it to a child step by step, I think we often forget this with some life and social skills. Ask a group of children (or my teenager) to “clean up” and you will get various results. Many children need this broken down: clean up the activity you are using, look around the floor where you were working, put your snack bag away, wipe the table, put your supplies in your pencil bag and close the bag. Taking the time to explain each step and model it consistently helps the students and me go from frustrated to functional.
Other skills that are needed at home or at school that might need to be divided into distinct steps include making friends, doing your homework, getting ready for bed, write a story, etc.
Reading
We are moving into meeting in small groups during our reading times to work on various skills and strategies. Some groups are working on decoding accurately and are diving into specific phonics skills. Once children are fluent readers, we like to start them on book clubs. A book club reads the same book, at the same pace, writes and thinks about what they’ve read and then meets to talk. I usually stagger the starting of the book clubs to help with my sanity and organization. At the beginning stages, each book club usually needs an adult to guide them at each meeting. The goal is to create a group that can meet, stay on task and work through a book independently. Of course, the children are practicing good speaking and listening skills at the same time.
The whole class is reading some nonfiction about communities. We are learning about the text features (captions, bolded words, graphs, photographs) that help us comprehend nonfiction. After reading small chunks, we process what we read by highlighting the main idea (the most important information).
Writing
After talking about different ways authors come up with ideas, the children are writing all kinds of new things, including a lot more nonfiction. We are moving into sentence-level-detail for a bit to study parts of speech, nouns and verbs, and sentence fluency. Sentence fluency is making sure that our sentences aren’t constructed the same way time after time.
Within nouns, we have looked at pronouns, plural nouns and proper nouns. We’ll move onto verbs and experiment with both action and linking verbs. Don’t be surprised to hear the word “nerb”, which is a word like fly, rock or saw that can be used as both as noun and a verb. While nerb is not a technical term and we coined this today in our classroom, I rather like it!
Math
Frogs were jumping and kids were measuring last week! All students did a lot of measuring with both centimeters/meters and inches/feet/yards lately. Race to a Yard/Meter is a great game that helped children see how we convert between the different units. We will continue with perimeter and area this week as well are do some measuring of mass using grams/kilograms and ounces/pounds. Geometry is still on the horizon!
The study of the four basic operations is never far from our math work and many of the math games the children do weekly help them hone their accuracy and efficiency with these skills.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
As we finish reading about traditional communities, we will also focus our thoughts onto what an ideal playground would have to meet the needs of our diverse school community.
We have been doing a lot more drawing together and having great conversations about math, vocabulary, writing, science, etc. Don’t tell the children, but they are also building fine motor stamina, concentration and attention to detail as we do this! There are some times during the week when frustration levels are rising and we will just stop, turn down the lights and get out our drawing books. While I do give them time to explore drawing their own things, the first part of the drawing lesson usually asks them to follow my directions exactly.
Week 11
November 14th-18th
Important Things and Events
We will be making pumpkin pie next Tuesday, November 22nd and then homemade tomato soup and grilled cheese on Wednesday. We will savor our yummy creations during a class lunch on Wednesday with all of the 2/3 students. Besides making homemade soup, we will be taste-testing canned soup. This ties in with The City of Ember. In addition, we will be watching A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving and other assorted educational videos on the afternoon of November 23rd.
If your child does not like the menu items, please send in an alternate lunch. Also please provide your child with a drink for that day. Students will have the chance to purchase hot lunch if they prefer that or to get a drink from the cafeteria.
I have created an electronic sign-up for food donations at signupgenius.com. You will have to create an account, but I plan on doing all sign ups (and trying to convince my 2/3 colleagues to do the same!) through this site. I will email you an invitation. Please be patient as this is a new process and there may be troublesome spots.
Next week, November 21st-23rd, there will not be spelling groups, spelling tests, math groups, homework or a blog update!
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
Many students are showing an increased ability to ask for help when they need it as opposed to getting frustrated, ignoring the task or wandering around the room. Yay! We are also talking a lot about solving problems in efficient and effective ways. A saying we like to use is, “What is your plan B?”
Reading
We continue to get ready to tackle more nonfiction. An important part of reading nonfiction or reading to learn is activating our prior knowledge of a topic before we dig in and start reading. Activating prior knowledge is also a necessary habit to build when reading longer chapter books. As readers, we do this each time we pick up a book and continue where we left off reading the previous time.
Along with activating prior knowledge, we continue to work with chunking words to help us read accurately. Older readers know this skill as syllabication. Some of the readers in A9 are studying smaller words parts like consonant blends and suffixes.
During our Class Book time, we have been noticing how authors advance a plot. We compare the plot line to a roller coaster, with spikes and dips that keep us interested in the story. Good authors also use multiple plot lines in a story and it’s been exciting to see some of our student writers trying this in their own stories as well.
Writing
While many children are enjoying working on longer stories, publishing their works, creating comics and revising, some students are stuck for a new idea. We will use several picture books this week to look at the ways authors see the world and how we can find good topics for writing.
Many students are also working on the idea of adding ideas and expanding parts of stories. We will use the same picture books mentioned above to see how authors find places to elaborate in their stories.
Math
The following concepts are being studied in our mixed 2/3 math groups: Tammy’s group is doing addition strategies (get to 10, pound and count on, doubles, and plus 1) column addition (adding 2, 2-digit numbers) and starting to look at regrouping larger numbers into ones and tens. Mary’s group is working on multiplication strategies. Salli’s group is doing a a mix of regrouping with addition and subtracting.
All of our students are getting a lot of practice measuring in inches, feet and yards. 2nd graders will continue to get practice making estimates, measuring in many units (inches, feet and yards) and choosing the best unit for a measuring task. 3rd graders will dig into the same ideas, but apply them to perimeter and area.
Science, Social Studies, Theme and Miscellaneous
We had two guest speakers in to talk about designing our current playground and how the designers had to think about the different needs of our school community six years ago. Students will now start to think about how our playground might be changed to meet the needs of our current community. Please know that our playground design probably will NOT change. However, we are using the concept of a “new” playground as a central focus in our communities project.
During the MAPSA conference, I attended a session on a program called Project 64. Basically, it uses drawing skills to teach students many lessons across reading, writing, math and some study skills. I am excited about the possibility of attending the training next summer. In the meantime, I will be exploring the use of it in our classroom this year.
Week 10
November 7-11, 2011
Important Things and Events
All students have logged onto and used Compass Learning (https://www.thelearningodyssey.com/) and RAZKids (http://www.raz-kids.com/) at this point The password and username for Compass is the first letter of the child’s first name and their last name, no spaces or capitals. The school must be typed as honey creek for Compass. There is always math on Compass Learning that your child can do for homework. For RAZKids, the teacher username is tculver. RAZKids is a great thing to do for reading homework.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
Students are familiar with asking their classmates for help. This week, we are focusing on making sure the message is/was received. Helpful things are 1. Say a person’s name, 2. Look them in the eye and use a loud voice while asking and 3. Check for understanding. This may sound simple, but many of these skills need to be broken down and practiced!
Reading
Yikes, we didn’t get to anything about nonfiction last week in either writing or reading! We will try to tackle this in the next week and I’ll keep you posted.
While reading the City of Ember, we are beginning to talk about making inferences. Traditionally, this is a hard skill for elementary students, but I always find that Honey Creek students have an easier time. We define inferences as things we know without the author telling us. Alternately, we say that we are reading between the lines.
Writing
Our class was happy to finish learning the lower case alphabet in cursive for the 3rd graders and reviewing the printed lower case alphabet for all students. We are moving on to capital letters
All students worked on the grammar concept of nouns and pronouns last week after we read some student writing that was full of he, she, and theys. Proper nouns will make their debut this week!
Students continue to use the writing process and to write each day. Many of the students are starting to publish their writing on the computer and adding it to our class library. We are grateful to Elliot’s mom, Terrie, and Bryce’s grandma, Grandma Mary, for coming in each week and helping us edit and publish. Students love to see their work in print!
Math
We are moving into measurement and some geometry at this point. Generally, we focus on one type of measurement at a time; linear, capacity, mass, time or money. Our state standards have us teaching both standard and metric measurement as well. The topic this week will be measuring length in inches, feet and yards. One thing we do often is to look at an item (for example, the dishwasher), tell what unit we would use, (inches) and then give an estimate.
Both measurement and geometry are full of vocabulary that is new to many 2nd and 3rd graders. You’ll hear more about geometry next week.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
We have practiced making maps at school and the math homework assignment this week is to make a map, as well. Along with other maps concepts, we are studying scale. During our wonderful field trip to the Ann Arbor District Library, we noticed all the different parts and buildings in a community. This week we will have a guest, Bryce’s mom, Megan, in to help us make a map of our playground.
Week 9
October 31st-November 4th
Important Things and Events
We will be going on a field trip to the Ann Arbor District Library on the afternoon of November 7th. If you would like to chaperone, please let Tammy know by October 28th. Our school policy is that parents may not ride the bus. Truthfully, you should be glad about this!!! 
It was great to see all of the families at conferences. Please look for the a copy of the green Goal sheet in this week’s Friday Folders. On half-days, it is really difficult for me to get papers ready to go home. Expect to see the few papers we do each week coming home on a regular basis again on Friday.
All students have logged onto and used Compass Learning (https://www.thelearningodyssey.com/) and RAZKids (http://www.raz-kids.com/) at this point. The password and username for Compass is the first letter of the child’s first name and their last name, no spaces or capitals. The school must be typed as honey creek for Compass. There is always math on Compass Learning that your child can do for homework. For RAZKids, the teacher username is tculver. RAZKids is a great thing to do for reading homework.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
After making pumpkin bread last week, one of our 2nd graders said to me, “I know why you have us cook, Tammy. It’s because it makes us work together to solve problems.”
Reading
This week, we will begin to look at nonfiction. We will be reading some things about communities and highlighting main ideas and text features as we read. Text features include things like maps, graphs, photos, captions and side-bars. Text features give us important information.
Each child will be asked to pick a nonfiction topic to read about as well. I am asking that they pick something they know relatively little about so we can experience reading to learn. Finding nonfiction that is appropriate for 2nd and 3rd grade reading levels can be challenging. I will be using many resources from Reading A-Z for this project.
Writing
Punctuation was a big topic last week. While reading the poem, “Melinda Mae”, we found almost all the different punctuation marks that elementary students use. We have practiced reading with punctuation and we’ll study more of this topic this week as well as do some practice editing for punctuation.
After reading nonfiction, all students will also be writing about what they’ve learned. We’ll explore different ways to start writing pieces—called Great Grabbers in our classroom. For nonfiction, some ways of starting a writing piece include using a fact, an opinion, a question or using or using a quote. While we’re writing, some of the older children will be asked to use paragraphs in their written piece.
Math
I’ve started working with small groups of students during math time, to teach and explore different types of addition and subtraction. I usually start the year with 3 or 4 math groups, built around the specific skills each child needs. As the year goes by and some students need reteaching and others need accelerated curriculum, I end up with 6 or 7 groups. If I can manage to meet with all my small groups once a week, I feel like a rock star! This never feels like enough time, but I am always reminded of how much more powerful a single, focused lesson is with a small group compared to many, larger whole-class lessons where a chunk of students are confused and another chunk of students are bored.
Besides small groups, we also do whole class lessons, review and individual math practice throughout the week .
As a reminder, the continuum for 2nd/3rd grade addition and subtraction goes something like this: adding 2-digit numbers without regrouping, subtracting 2-digit numbers without regrouping, adding/subtracting 2-digit numbers with regrouping, adding/subtracting larger and more numbers with regrouping and using decimals in addition and subtraction.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
The class will do some reading, thinking and writing about what types of communities we live in and the different goods and services in each community. Then, our focus will shift to a study of the Honey Creek community and an even more in-depth look at the playground in our community. We will hear from 3 or 4 experts on the history of Honey Creek, the history of our playground and how to map our playground.
Week 8
Important Things!
October 28th is a half day. Dismissal is at noon. Conferences are scheduled for these days and the sign-up is posted in the A-wing hall. Please plan to have your child attend with you as the students participate in these meetings.
We will be going on a field trip to the Ann Arbor District Library on the afternoon of November 7th. If you would like to chaperone, please let Tammy know by October 28th. Our school policy is that parents may not ride the bus. Truthfully, you should be glad about this!!!
The policy at Honey Creek is that we do not celebrate Halloween, Valentine’s Day, Christmas, etc. in the classroom. I have to be quite strict about this, so no stickers, pencils, cookies, etc.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
All of our students continue to get along well, both in and out of the classroom. We have the normal ups and downs like most classrooms, but I’m always impressed with how kind and generally empathetic Honey Creek students are as compared to other places I’ve taught.
We continue to work on improving the effectiveness of our I statements. Instead of, “I don’t like it when you annoy me,” we strive for a more direct statement of what exactly is annoying. “I don’t like it when you sing in my ear,” and so on help clearly define what behavior the child is addressing.
One of my favorite tenets from Love and Logic is gently and lovingly giving a problem back to a child to solve. When confronted with, “I lost my pencil,” I usually respond with “Hmm, what are you going to do about that?” Over time, children become more self-reliant and able to solve problems more independently. If the child is stuck, I will guide them to a solution, usually saying things like, “Do you want some ideas on how to solve this problem?”
Reading
I teach and model a lot of comprehension strategies during our class book. We’ve practiced Visualize, Ask Questions, Make Predictions and Check for Understanding among others. We practice them orally first and then the students start writing a response to the day’s reading in their notebooks. Students share their responses quite often, modeling different ways to think and write about each comprehension strategy.
Some more advanced readers are beginning author studies and book clubs during our read to self time. I forgot to share reading levels with many parents at the first set of conferences. We use the levels A-Z to mark at which level your child reads. We want beginning 2nd graders to read at a level H, beginning 3rd graders to read at a Level N and those going on to 4th grade to read at an R. If you want the level of your child, send me an email or come in and see me.
Writing
Many of the students are excited about publishing. Published pieces live in a special place in our classroom, but they first have to go through the writing process. The process includes writing, revising, editing and then publishing. I have introduced the acronym COPS to help with editing. C=capitals—all proper nouns and at the beginning of sentences; 3rd graders should be able to use capitals in titles as well. O=overall—children need to do a slow, careful read to find places where they missed words, misused a word, etc. P=Punctuation—end marks (. ! ?) for all children at this point. We will explore more uses of commas as the year goes on and 3rd graders begin using quotation marks. S=spelling—all children are responsible for word wall words, 3rd graders start to use various dictionaries to look up some of the misspelled words.
Math
Place value continues to be a focus as we explore how regrouping work in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. In addition, we are working on various topics in the four major operations. The continuum in 2nd/3rd grade goes something like this: adding 2-digit numbers without regrouping, subtracting 2-digit numbers without regrouping, adding/subtracting 2-digit numbers with regrouping, adding/subtracting larger and more numbers with regrouping, multiplication facts, division facts and then multiplication and division with larger numbers.
Time is practiced throughout the day, as well and I encourage all families to keep their child looking at an analog clock and telling the time if this hasn’t been mastered yet!
Science, Social Studies and Theme
The MEAP and our half day took away any work that we might have done in this area. The 2/3 team is getting ready to launch our study of the history of Honey Creek and the playground, as well as the integrated project that will involve studying playgrounds and creating a new playground.
Week 7
The last day of the MEAP for 3rd graders is Tuesday, October 18th. They will be taking the math portion on that morning.
Swimming is normal this week!
We have switched our library day to Friday. Feel free to send in books on any day and we’ll make sure they get turned in.
October 21st and 28th are half days. Dismissal is at noon. Conferences are scheduled for these days and the sign-up is posted in the A-wing hall. Please plan to have your child attend with you as the students participate in these meetings.
We will be going on a field trip to the Ann Arbor District Library on the afternoon of November 7th. If you would like to chaperone, please let Tammy know by October 28th. Our school policy is that parents may not ride the bus. Truthfully, you should be glad about this!!!
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
We have a sign on our door that says, “Help will always be given in A9 to those who ask for it politely.” It’s been great to see our students ask for help when they need it and not give up, find something else to do or distract a neighbor. We are also working on using our nice voices or “honey words” the first time a person asks for something. We often use the phrase, “Honey catches more flies than vinegar.”
In a small school with multi-aged classrooms, the students end up more like siblings than classmates at times. Another topic that has come up in the last week is not escalating a situation. Sometimes siblings (at least at my house!) know exactly what buttons to push to make each other angry. We also keep in mind that everyone struggles in some area and we all need support to do our best when faced with a challenge.
Reading
With the MEAP schedule, nothing I mentioned last week got done! This is the way it works at times, folks. So, my goal is to do more work on fact and opinion this week and start the strategy of Flip the Vowel. The students continue to read independently each day and I continue to conference with them to see how they are progressing on their goals.
The students are enjoying the City of Ember quite a bit. With some children having seen the movie, we are asking that they keep what happens a secret.
Writing
I’ve seen over the years that reading and writing taking turns blossoming in individual children and within the class. Last week was a great week for writing in A9! Our students are working on stories, comics, plays and poems. We have finished our fall poems; look for them on our Poet-Tree soon! (Thanks to Kira for the great name!) While comics are popular, we have had discussions about finding a balance between using drawings and words to tell a story. Illustrations do the same things words do for the most part, but I do want my students to develop their skills in writing cohesive sentences and paragraphs. We’ve also had great discussions about author’s purpose, which tie in to both reading and writing. We’ve come up with the following purposes for writing: to entertain, to teach or to persuade.
This week, we also started Word Work. This is time set aside to practice spelling, grammar, parts of speech and/or vocabulary. We do this in many ways: clay writers, stamps, word pyramids, rainbow words, vowel/consonant writing and making vocabulary collections are just a few.
Math
Math got short-changed as well last week with the MEAP. We did learn the game Top It and many students are loving the challenge of reading larger numbers. I love multi-age for many reasons and one was highlighted last week. I did not formally teach the concept of reading larger numbers and/or using the comma between the thousands and hundred’s places, but most children are picking this up by playing Top It with other students. There were even some heated debates about the use of the word “and”, the comma and how to read these bigger words. Children love this topic and we’ll read some great books and practice words like quintillion later this month.
I did send home specific homework in the area of place value with your child on Friday. You do not need to return this to me. I am trying to do this about once a month so parents have an exact idea of where I think each child should focus their math work. Because I usually have at least three sets of papers for different needs in math, I cannot replace any lost sheets.
All the 2/3 classes also started meeting in math groups this week. We will meet on Mondays for about 45 minutes. Salli, Mary and I have placed your child in the class that we think best meets their needs. We ask you to be patient as we figure out if the placement was correct. We are also working on finding a way to communicate to you what each class is working on during their Monday sessions.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
Never eat soggy waffles!!! Hopefully, you’ve learned what this acronym means. We are exploring different maps and beginning to use north, south, east and west to help us describe where things are. We’ll also look at the ideas of scale and legends in the next few days. The City of Ember has us thinking about what kinds of jobs and services are important in a community as well.
Week 6
Important News and Events
For this week only, 2nd graders will swim on Tuesday and 3rd graders will swim on Friday.
All children in Michigan are taking the MEAP tests for the next two weeks. 3rd graders will take the reading test on two days, October 11 and 12 and the math portion on October 18. During the test, we do divide up the children differently. All the 3rd graders will be testing with Tammy in A9, the 2nd graders will be doing activities with Mary and Salli will be helping with the small groups that need accommodations. During these next two weeks, schedules and groupings of children may change. It makes many children cranky to have changes in their routines, so please emphasize the importance of being flexible!
October 21st and 28th are half days. Dismissal is at noon. Conferences are scheduled for these days and the sign-up is posted in the A-wing hall. Please plan to have your child attend with you as the students participate in these meetings.
If you are able, please sign up to help with recycling or to be a Guest Reader outside of A6.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
Something we emphasize at Honey Creek that makes us unique is all children are accepted during free choice, playground interactions and class projects. Children may choose to play alone if they need this solitary time, but otherwise, “You can’t say you can’t play.” We did have an incident or two on the playground where an individual or group of children were excluded. Most children know this falls under “disturbing” and know to seek adult help when this happens.
In addition, we talked a bit last week about being a family and sticking up for our classmates if we see something this isn’t right. This is a hard skill for some children to master, but one that will serve them well as adults.
Reading
I am happy to see students continuing to build their stamina during Read-To-Self. Many children are jumping into longer books as well. I do try to emphasize that children read books from start to finish. While we all like to browse through books at some times, reading a complete story helps build experience with the more advanced literary elements that older elementary students need to master eventually.
This week, we all will explore the idea of fact and opinion in our reading. This skill comes in handy when reading both fiction and nonfiction. Another skill we will add to our CAFE menu is Flip the Vowel. This falls under accuracy and not all children will need this skill. When children encounter a vowel in an unknown word, Flipping the Vowel helps them try the short sound and the long sound in the word and see what makes more sense. Of course, English is full of exceptions to the rules of vowel sounds, but knowing at least the short and long sounds is a good place to start.
We finished hearing Ramona the Pest and enjoyed Ramona’s antics. I’m happy to report several students are starting other books by Beverly Cleary. It has become a tradition in my classes to “celebrate” each class book with a related cooking project. So, we will make pumpkin bread either this week or next.
Our next class book will be The City of Ember. This book helps us learn about the idea of communities and it facilitates a great introduction of maps and how they help us
Writing
Because the MEAP will mess with our schedule a bit, I have postponed the nonfiction writing project I mentioned last week. Instead, we have started writing some poems. We took a walk out in the woods today and many children got a good start on a poem having to do with autumn. We used our five senses to help us get ideas for our poems. I am also asking that they focus each poem on one thing. Young writers will often write in a “bed-to-bed” fashion, including everything they did from waking up to going to bed in one story. Instead, we try to have them focus a story on one interesting thing from that day and say a lot about one thing instead of a little about a lot of things. I use the idea of a telescope to help facilitate this concept.
Our class has also started building our Word Wall. These are words we use frequently in writing, but have a tricky spelling pattern. So far, we have said, like, very, really, when and I. Once a word in on the Word Wall, children are held accountable for spelling it correctly every time. If your 3rd grader is still misspelling these words, it would be helpful for you to have a duplicate Word Wall somewhere in the house, so if they are using the words in their homework, they are spelled correctly every time.
Math
Once again, I am finding that most of the students have a good start at mastering their grade-level expectations in the area of time. We will continue to work on this throughout the year. Time and money are things I spiral back to constantly throughout the year.
We will begin to work on place value ideas this week or next. Children in 2nd grade start working with numbers in the hundreds and thousands as well as beginning two digit column addition. 3rd graders work with numbers up to hundred-thousands as well as beginning to do more things with decimals. Pointing out decimals in the world and rounding these to whole numbers is helpful. 2nd graders will soon learn a game called Top-It that helps build place value concepts and problem solving. Many of our game use digit cards-two copies of each digit 0-9 on separate cards. You can make these with index cards or download them here: http://www.mathwire.com/numbersense/morepv.html
Science, Social Studies and Theme
Children learned the vocabulary of landforms and bodies of water. We also got to head to the playground and make many of these in the sandbox. The next step will be to explore how geography impacts human development and communities and how humans impact the land and water around us. As I mentioned, our new class book will also lead us into a fun unit on maps. Expect a math mapping exercise this or the following Friday for the weekly homework.
Week 5
Important News and Events
Picture day is October 5th. We will swim on Friday and not Wednesday for this week only.
October 7, 21 and 28 and all half days. Dismissal is at noon.
The 2/3 Picnic is October 4th from 5PM-7PM here at Honey Creek. Look for more information from our room parents (Trish Gearheart and Alex Foulis).
If you are able, please sign up to help with recycling or to be a Guest Reader outside of A6.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
While we made bread last Tuesday, it was great to sit back and watch the children interact. The children are so comfortable working together, that once I explained all the steps in the recipe, I had to do very little to manage the groups.
One thing we all instill in our classrooms here at Honey Creek is that our veterans and all of our classmates can help each other. If the teacher is busy with a student, other students are always encouraged to ask others for help.
Reading
To go along with making our bread, we practiced “Read with Someone” or Buddy Reading on Friday while reading The Little Red Hen. Children were put in pairs, given some parameters and asked to practice reading. Then, each pair was assigned a page of the book to divide up with their partner and practice in preparation for reading it out loud to the class. The children had to use their interpersonal skills to divide up the reading. In addition, we also practiced the idea of asking someone who is struggling if they want time to figure it on their own or coaching. We will do more Buddy Reading throughout the year. I did video tape our performance of The Little Red Hen and I will share this here once I get all the photo release forms signed. You will get an email this week if I do not have yours!
3rd graders will take the Reading and Math MEAP later in October. We are pulling the 3rd graders together and going over the types and formats of questions they might see during this test. This is not teaching to the test, but rather giving the children an idea of what they will encounter. Since we do so little read-and-answer-multiple-choice-questions, we wanted the children to have some experience with this so the test truly shows what they know and not how well they can “test” on any given day. We will meet with the 3rd graders once or twice more before the actual MEAP.
For the coming week, we will continue to build our stamina reading fiction and nonfiction during Read to Self. I am meeting with 3-4 children each day to check on their reading progress. Some children need me to meet with them once or twice a week and others need to be “checked with” more frequently. One strategy that many of the children are working on falls under Accuracy and we call it Chunk It. When a word is really big or confusing, we look for smaller parts or chunks of the word that we can read. Along with this strategy, many children need to remember to read through the word. Some children will look at or know the first part of a word and then guess what the word is without reading through the whole word.
Writing
Take a look at our published pieces outside of A9! Each child worked hard on their piece and they are proud of their efforts. Yes, there are mistakes on the published copies! No, I do not correct every mistake every child makes on a published piece. As I mentioned at the Parent Curriculum Night, I work hard to push each child to work within their zone of proximal development. For some children, getting a few sentences through the writing process and published was really hard work. Other children are more resilient and ready for me to give them the super-duper erasers, even after a piece of writing has gone through the writing process.
We have begun to explore writing nonfiction and are composing a piece as a class about how to make bread. I hope to show the children in the coming weeks just how many types of writing we can do on one topic. The topic of bread can inspire fiction, nonfiction, poetry, fantasy and more.
Math
Most of the children have a good grasp on the money concepts I outlined here last week. We will continue to practice these ideas and add a little more challenge each time. You will start to see amounts of money along with the planner messages each day. After writing the planner message, the children need to count an assortment of coins and, for a challenge, the older children are adding or subtracting this money to another amount.
We will begin to do more with time this week, in addition to practicing strategies for the four operations. 2nd graders need to be able to tell time by 5-minute intervals. 3rd graders need to tell time to the minute and solve word problems with elapsed time. Both of these skills should be with both digital and analog clocks, If you have an analog clock at home, you can help by having your child tell time from this throughout the day.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
The great bread experiments are over and the samples went home today. We will use this experiment throughout the year to help use understand more about how experiments work. We are moving into our study of communities and will begin with some basics in the area of landforms and map skills.
Week 4
Important News and Events
Homework and spelling start this week. Each student gets their words and the homework grid on Friday. There is a grid posted on the 2/3 website and the spelling words are usually updated on the website by Monday afternoon. We have talked with the children about how the homework works and there are directions on the grid. If you are still confused, let me know.
Picture day is October 5th. I will check with Kristen, but normally we don’t swim if we haven’t had our pictures taken. Stay tuned . . .
The 2/3 Picnic is October 4th from 5PM-7PM here at Honey Creek. Look for more information from our room parents (Trish Gearheart and Alex Foulis).
Thank you for all of your generous donations this week!
The sign-up for Guest Reader is outside of A6. Also outside of A6 is a sign-up to help with recycling. It is very frustrating, but Honey Creek can’t get recycling pick-up for things other than paper, and the paper bins fill up quickly. We have been asking for parents to help each week to collect the things we accumulate in our classrooms and drop them off at a recycling spot of your choice.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
I have been really pleased to see all of our classmates interact so well together on the playground and in the class. We are continuing to read more of Julia Cook’s books. I‘m a Booger and I Deserve Respect, Volcano Mouth and It’s Hard to be a Verb have been among the favorites.
Reading
Our big strategy last week was Tune in To and Use New or Interesting words. We are keeping a class collection of these words and some students will be starting their own word collections later this fall. Another strategy we are using is the Comprehension strategy of Visualize. We’ve been practicing both strategies during our current class book, Ramona the Pest.
Students are continuing to build their stamina during Read to Self. I am done with my reading assessments and will begin setting goals with each of your children and also meeting in small groups to practice skills and strategies.
Today we had a big discussion about fiction and nonfiction. Most children tend to read one of these genres exclusively. We compared reading both genres to having a balanced diet and how this helps us be stronger readers. All children were asked to add books to their box so they have both genres.
Writing
All children completed their piece focusing on something they are good at doing. I put the children in partners and they were all asked to revise. We define revise as “make it better” and edit as “make it correct”. Most pairs of students included a veteran and I was thrilled to see how helpful the veterans were at explaining and helping with revision. When the students revise, edit or correct anything in A9, they always use a dark blue or red pen. If you see purple, green or another color, that is my writing!
After revising, I have worked with each child to edit their piece. Later this week, we will publish, illustrate and display our final products.
Most of our Writing Workshop time is devoted to children writing about their own interests and topics. To facilitate this, we have had some lessons about “Ideas”. We have read pictures books and are starting to make lists and collages of possible topics. We’re finding that anything from yeast, to the globe to recess can give us great writing ideas.
Math
All students are working on strategies for adding, subtracting or multiplying. I am finishing my math assessments and hope to share with you where I think you might focus your homework efforts. I also hope to share more ideas and websites for math homework practice this year. For this first week, you might want to have your child teach you one of the math games we have learned. One for 2nd graders especially is Coin Collector. You need 8 quarters, 6 dimes, 6 nickels, 20 pennies and one die to play. All the students should now the directions well by now.
Money is also a focus for this week and next. 2nd graders are identifying and counting coins. With all the new coins, it is important that children get real-life exposure to a variety of coins. Take out a handful of coins and have your child count it whenever possible. We will also begin to talk about the difference between the dollar and cent signs. 3rd graders are adding and subtracting larger amounts of money, gaining expertise with decimals and rounding and estimating with various amounts of money.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
Our bread experiment is going slowly and the children were disappointed about the lack of mold we’ve seen after a week. After discussing the reasons for this and the idea of preservatives, we will be making our own bread this week and doing the experiment again. There will also be some extra bread for snacks! Many children wanted to try the experiment with other variables (more or less salt, more water on the bread before collecting germs, more or less yeast, etc) and I encouraged them to talk about it and try it at home!
Week 3
Important News and Events
Please plan on attending our Curriculum Night on Tuesday, September 20th from 6:30-8:30PM. We’ll be in A6 (Mary’s room) and we’ll offer the same program and information at 6:30 and 7:30. There will be no handouts this year, but we will post our presentations on our website.
Picture Day is October 5th. Information on ordering pictures will be in planners on Monday.
We are running dangerously low on antibacterial wipes and hand sanitizer. If you are able to donate either of these items, it saves our school-supply budget for other things.
Intra and Inter Personal Topics
We continued to learn about each other and how to work with partners and in teams last week. A favorite activity was making play-dough in a small group and having to follow a recipe and figure out who was doing each part.
Each table group came up with a name and an icon as well, and we talked about the different ways of making a decision. While consensus is usually preferred, we sometimes have to resort to a vote where the majority wins.
In the coming week, we’ll continue to work on team-building and we’ll be reading more of Julia Cook’s excellent books. All the children were riveted as I read The Worst Day of My Life Ever (my story about listening and following directions . . or NOT) this week.
We are starting our Very Important Person program as well. Please look for more information on this to come home in planners on Monday.
Reading
It was great to see our class build our stamina for reading independently from 10 minutes to 25 minutes this week! While your children are reading, I am meeting with individual students or small groups to do assessments and mini-lessons.
All the 2-3 teachers use the same assessment protocol adapted from the work of Irene Fountas and Gay Su Pinnell. This system assigns each reader to a level from A-Z. Generally, we want beginning 2nd grade readers to read at a H/I level, beginning 3rd graders to read at a N/O level and beginning 4th graders to read at a R/S level.
All the 2-3 teachers also teach reading strategies that correspond to Comprehension, Accuracy, Fluency and Expanding Vocabulary. The nifty acronym is CAFE and I introduced three strategies this week: Check for Comprehension, Cross-Checking (does it look and sound right, does it make sense?) and Reread. Your child should be able to use these at home soon, if not currently.
In the coming week, I’ll finish my initial reading assessments and we’ll work on the three strategies above while introducing the Vocabulary strategy of Tune In and Use Interesting Words.
Writing
We didn’t fit in much writing last week, but we did start brainstorming for a piece of writing called “Something I’m Good at Doing”. We’ll continue to write a first draft of this piece this week. One major thing I do in my room is have children skip lines when writing. This creates a much more legible piece and more easily allows for revising and editing.
The children write a letter to each week’s VIP on Fridays. We have been talking about the spelling issues I outlined in Week 2′s blog quite a bit. It was wonderful to see how easily each child wrote his or her letter on Friday without overly worrying about spelling. I do keep copies of the first VIPS letters each child writes for my files. My heart did flips to see how far my veteran writers have come since the beginning of 2nd grade!
Math
Each child did a basic assessment on addition and subtraction this week. This helps me set math goals for each child and plan my future instruction. We also learned more math games, so each child now knows how to play at least FatBat, Countdown and More. We’ll learn about memory-type games this week. Quite a bit of time is spent learning the routines of playing math games, too. We practiced finding a partner, getting the supplies for each game, finding a good spot and using our Two-Finger voices while playing.
All the 2nd and 3rd grade children will be completing a longer math assessment in the next two weeks or so. In conjunction with our School Improvement Plan and state mandates, Mary, Salli and I designed an assessment for each grade that covers the major math topics for that grade. It is designed to be both a pre- and post-assessment, so we expect each child to struggle a bit on parts of it in September. I’ll share the results of these assessments with you during our October conferences.
Science, Social Studies and Theme
During our first experiment, we made predictions about which apple would lose the most water over five days. We talked about the inquiry process and learned about using a balance scale. Our experiment this week will emphasize the importance of having a control during an experiment.
Week 2
We’ve had a great start to our school year and are already learning a lot about the routines in A9, our classmates and ourselves. The rain and resulting indoor recesses were frustrating, but we survived!
I’ll offer a general “forecast” each week of what we are doing in each subject and the highlights in our room. I gauge what I want to do each day with your children on many fluctuating factors, so don’t be surprised if things change throughout the week. Another reason I am putting a lot of effort into this weekly blog is the 2/3 teachers don’t do a lot of paper practice, dittoes or worksheets. Because few papers go home, parents are sometimes uncertain about what we are doing all day! Look to the planner message as the first line of communication. Besides reminding you of important events, I try to put information in there that can spark some good conversations about what we are doing.
Important News and Events
- Please make sure your child has shoes for PE and an additional pair of slippers, clogs, flip-flops, etc… to keep our floor clean.
- We have two snacks each day. There will be a sign-up for the weekly fruit bowl soon and I do accept donations of extra snack for the times when your child forgets. Please limit the extra snack donations to pretzels or wheat saltine-type crackers. Anything more exciting than this can lead to false hunger and a general feeding frenzy at snack time.
- If you have not turned in your paperwork to Karen Giltrow, including your photo release, please do so ASAP. I am looking forward to sharing pictures from our classroom on this website, but I can’t do so until I know for certain which children’s photos are allowed.
- Children do not bring their planners home on Fridays. Parents should be reading the planner message and signing the planner each Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday evenings. Your signature means you’ve seen the planner message. I will often write notes in the planner about your child and you can write to me, too.
Intra- and Intra- Personal Topics
Most of the parents should be aware of how we use “I” statements and SOS to help children solve as many things as they can on their own. In the 2/3 classrooms, we add another layer called “Debugging”. If someone is bugging a child, we ask the child to try the following steps: 1. Ignore it 2. Move away 3. Use your polite words—an “I” statement 4. Use your firm words 5. Get a teacher. The exceptions to using debugging are if something is Dangerous, Destructive or Disturbing. If an issue falls into the 3D category, the student should get a teacher right away.
I’ve spent a lot of time reading about and honing my skills in a program called Love and Logic this summer. It works well in the classroom and at my house! Because I am such a fan of this program, I’ll be sharing some Love and Logic tips and strategies with you throughout the year.
Reading
We spend about 30 minutes a day in what we call Class Book. This is when I am reading out loud, usually from a chapter book, to the whole class. It is one of our favorite times and we have the best conversations here. Last week and this week my students have heard from Franny K. Stein and The Littles. These are both great series for 2nd and 3rd grade students. Book series are great for many readers of this age, so I will start the year introducing some good series to the students and hoping to entice more reading of these titles by individual students.
IPICK is the acronym we use for students choosing a book for our Read to Self period that we have at least once a day. I’ve borrowed the following excerpt from Alicia Darby on www.thedailycafe.com to explain this.
This week we have been learning how to choose good fit books and why it is important to choose books that we can read. Research shows when children are reading independently, they should be reading books they understand and can read. Reading books that are too difficult can lead to frustration, inability to understand the story, and then reading is no longer enjoyable. We want children to enjoy reading, which means it is important they are reading books they are interested in and on their just right level!
Research also shows that children are motivated to read when they can choose their own books.Every year many parents ask, “How can I help my child choose books that he or she can read?” There is a very simple way to help your child choose good fit books. It is called IPICK.
IPICK is an acronym that stands for: I choose books to read, Purpose, Interest, Comprehend, and Know the words. Here are some easy steps that you and your child can follow in order to choose good fit books:
1. Have your child choose a book. This is the first I in IPICK which means “I choose books to read”.
2. Ask your child, “What is your purpose for choosing this book?” You may also want to ask, “is it for fun or to learn something?”. This is the P in IPICK which means purpose.
3. Ask your child, “Is this a book you are interested in?” This is the second I, which means interest.
4. Have your child read a page of the book. After your child reads the page, ask your child, “Who did you read about and what did they do?”. This is the C in IPICK which stands for Comprehend. If it is a good fit book your child should be able to answer your question.
5. Have your child read another page (or use the same page) and ask, “Did you know the words?”. This is the K in IPICK which stands for know the words. Your child should know all or almost all of the words in order for it to be a good fit book.
Going through the steps of choosing a good fit book should only take a couple minutes. It has been my experience that many children can easily choose good fit books once they have mastered the process of IPICK. Other children may need more guidance from mom or dad as they choose good fit books. This is an ongoing process that we will continue to learn and practice at school.
Writing
We will begin to use the writing process in our Writing Workshop time this week. I’ll offer more detail on this in future posts and at our Curriculum Night. One of the most important ways parents can help to support young writers is to know when and how to focus on spelling and handwriting. There are certainly times when I insist children use their best spelling and handwriting and I make these expectations quite transparent to my students. We also work on spelling skills and handwriting each week in our classroom.
However, when the goal of a writing period is to draft a story or a piece of writing, I do not focus on spelling nor do I spell words for my students. I simply tell them to sound it out the best they can, circle it and then move on. If young children only use words they are certain they can spell correctly, what ends up on the paper is short, unimaginative and does not show the wonderful ideasgoing on in their heads.
Math
While I will be beginningmath assessments this week, we are also learning many math games. These games reinforce basic skills and also provide a chance for children to practice their communication and interpersonal skills. These games are also great for homework activities.
Operations will be the first math strand we will explore and in 2nd and 3rd grade it ranges from adding and subtracting single digit numbers all the way up to multiplication and division of large numbers.
Theme, Science and Social Studies
We will do one or two experiments this week with apples and talk about the scientific method and the vocabulary that goes along with this. We form a hypothesis, design and do an experiment and then gather and analyze data. Franny K Stein, from our Class Book is a “mad scientist”, so the children and I have already had some great discussions about experiments.
Week 1 September 6th-9th
Most of our week will be spent learning about our classmates, our classroom and the routines we will use for the year. Your children will get new supplies, build book boxes, attend many of their specials and begin to think about what he or she would like to learn this year.
The main theme this year is How Things Work and the 2-3 spin on this will be Communities. I will be reading books and doing activities this week that help your child experience two main ideas. The first idea is that everyone in A9 is part of a unique and close-knit family. The second idea is that we all have unique strengths and challenges that we bring to our classroom and to this school year. Both of these ideas are central to helping your child begin to feel comfortable within their multi-age classroom.
Our first day of specials starts on Wednesday, September 7th with swimming at 8:30AM. Your children will bring home their planners for the first time on Wednesday, September 7th as well.
Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions or concerns.