Important Dates: Thursday, October 6 - Curriculum night Friday, October 14 - No school - Teacher prep day Wednesday, October 26 - 2-hour early dismissal - 12:05pm Monday, October 31 - Halloween celebration Hello families, The Jog-a-thon went really great! This annual event is a great time in the beginning of the year to discuss the importance of and reasons why we set goals, and how our goals are unique to who we are and what we are working on. On Thursday, students set personal goals for the Jog-a-thon. Goals ranged from drinking more water, running 23 to 25 laps to being able to walk without stopping. We enjoyed the time to get to know each other and bond as a class. On Monday, we will look at our goals and talk about what went well at the Jog-a-thon and how setting a goal helped us improve and grow. Here is a quick run down of the last two weeks: Writing: Writers have come to a pivotal turning point in our narrative writing unit! We are starting to look at mentor authors and using their craft moves in our own writing. We have looked at Jane Yolen's Owl Moon, Kevin Henkes' Julius: The Baby of the World, and I Will Never Not Ever Eat a Tomato by Lauren Child to see how they start and end their stories. Students will continue to build these craft moves into our stories as they grow as writers this year. Reading: This week we worked on strategies for what to do when we come across a tricky word. The most used strategy in our class this week was sounding out words part by part, followed by using the context to help us figure out the meaning of the word. Next week, we will kick off our word work (phonics and phonemic awareness), reviewing the phonetic skills students built last year using the Reading Horizons curriculum. Math: We have been working on our counting by 10 and 100 to 1,000 and developing our understanding of place value by building, breaking apart and comparing 3-digit numbers. We will wrap up our place value unit next week by continuing to compare and order numbers up to 1,000.
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Important Dates:
Thursday, September 22 - Picture Day Wednesday, September 28 - Early Release - 12:05pm Friday, September 30 - Jog-A-Thon Hi families, What a fabulous first week! I have had such fun getting to know your students and celebrating our teamwork and growth in this first (full) week. International Dot Day This week we were inspired to talk about optimism and perseverance by reading The Dot by Peter Reynolds. Students talked about how Vashti pushed herself to try new, challenging tasks by staying positive and believing in herself. Students created their own dots as a way to demonstrate their individuality and as a reminder to push themselves when they come across challenging tasks. Buddy Reading We had our first session of reading buddies! This year, we will partner with Ms. Hunter's fourth grade students. Students were lovely hosts, inviting Ms. Hunter's class into our room, showing the students our library and various reading nooks. We look forward to our partnership this year! Math In math this week, students explored 3-digit numbers and the meaning of place value and found patterns within 100 through skip counting by 2's, 5's and 10's. Ask your student to teach you how to play Guess My Number. It's fun practice and brings up interesting conversations about digits vs. value of numbers. Writing Students continued to build skills for writing personal narratives. Students used story ideas from their tiny notebooks to ignite their story telling. In this unit, students will work on building their skills by making a plan for their stories and adding details to immerse their readers in their stories. Reading Students made individual reading goals this week to read more and more. Second year is a big year of growth, and students are already putting in hard work. Science Students made predictions about what is in soil, recorded their predictions in the science notebooks, and then tested their predictions by examining soil! Next week, we will look at how soil is made with the help of worms. Important dates:
Thursday, September, 22 - Picture Day Wednesday, September 28 - Early release - 12:05pm Friday, September 30 - JOG-A-THON! Hello families, Welcome to a new school year and to 2nd grade! I am so excited to have your student in my classroom. Already in this first week we have started creating a strong, supportive learning community. In this first week, we introduced ourselves, started self-portraits, and got the lay of the land. The beginning of the year is all about solidifying routines and creating and applying classroom guidelines and expectations. We have also started implementing the building-wide QAE common behaviors. This includes walking in the hallway quietly so that learners in the hallways and in classrooms can concentrate and focus. So far, we have been doing so well practicing throughout the building that we got a compliment from a third grader! Below is a brief summary of this week's academic activities: Writing: Students completed beginning of the year writing assessments for narrative, informational and opinion writing. They did great! Students were focused and applied all their skills from last year. Reading: We toured our classroom library and students practiced choosing just-right books from a small selection. Next week we will start book shopping and reader's workshop. Math: This week, students started with an open-ended problem solving question. Students organized the problem in their preferred manner using manipulatives or drawing a picture. Then I partnered students with another student in order to work together to combine solutions to come up with the most complete response together. We will continue building these mathematical problem solving skills throughout the year. I am going to send out reminders through REMIND. This is an app that allows me to send out reminders to your phone or email. Here is my class code if you would like to get reminders from me through REMIND: https://www.remind.com/join/msthibau Thanks and have a good weekend! |
Ms. ThibautOne of the second grade teachers at QAE. Read this blog and stay up-to-date on classroom activities. Archives
March 2017
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Ms. Thibault's 2nd Grade | Class Blog |