Happy New Year!

Students entered our room with smiles and joy on Wednesday!  Our students are kind, wonderful people and it felt great to welcome the new year with their positive energy and thoughtfulness.  

Ms. Bryce, our student teacher from St. Michael's College has joined our classroom community.  She will teach with us every day until April vacation.  Ms. Bryce loves to teach and we are grateful for her journey with us.  

We will celebrate kindness in the month of January.  A Kindness Calendar will go home on Monday with a description of ideas and options to record attached. 

We experienced many cooperative tasks this week.  We made snowmen from a six-foot piece of construction paper.  We worked together learning coins and multi-digit subtraction strategies while reading the book Alexander Who Used to Be Rich Last Sunday by Judith Viorst and we started writing question-answer books with new topics!

 


During Mrs. Wheeler's guidance time we held our first class meeting.  We discussed what makes our classroom a great place to learn and what each of us can do to continue to make that happen.  I'm proud of each member of our learning community, each person spoke their truth, were kind and willing to speak.  I shared with our students, and I'll say it again, I'm proud to be their teacher.  

Next week begins our winter schedule for creative arts.  Our hour-long cross country ski day for PE will be on Tuesdays.  Please make sure your child has all their outdoor gear for this experience. 


Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle 

Experiences Abound!

Our science focus is on weathering and erosion.  As a model of our earth changing both fast and slow, we used a rock tumbler with the aid of water, sand, and gravel.  Here are our pre and post pictures of our rocks.


During the month of December, our word study focus will be on high-frequency words.  Each student has an individualized list.  We will also be working on handwriting and fine motor skills with our variety of activities.

We are writing and reading nonfiction like experts.  This week our work was writing chapter books about a topic we are experts about.  Our students are writing at least four chapters.  They are writing fast and furiously to get their ideas down on paper.  We are learning about nonfiction through mentor authors like Gail Gibbons, who lives in Vermont and has written over 120 books.  

Not only are we authors ourselves, and learning about authors, we also experienced a webinar this week with Jacqueline Woodson! We read her book titled, The Day You Begin.  We also pulled out books she mentioned that she's written titled Each Kindness and The Other Side.

I look forward to seeing you at the concert, this Wednesday, December 12th.  Children arrive at 6:15 in our classroom, the concert will start at 6:30 pm.  

Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle

Learning in Action!

 Our second graders enjoy spending time in our afternoons reading!  We are reading fiction and nonfiction books right now.  I'm so proud of their sustained reading time, effort and growth.

 
Here we are engaged in a science task about the water and landforms. This week we focused on water, wind, and weather.  We will use this knowledge to help understand weather and erosion. 

Our St. Michael's interns Mr. Foley, Ms. Lauren and Ms. Megan each taught a math lesson focused on comparing problems.  We are learning multi-digit subtraction in class using multiple strategies.  We are practicing subtraction into the previous decade using an open number line as well as decomposition.  I'm proud of their ability to work thoughtfully, practice skills in games like 6 rolls, and express their math thinking in a verbal and written format. 

We are writing our first nonfiction book!  We created expert and interest lists.  We created our own dictionaries.  We have started our brainstorms and created the chapter topics for our books. 

Mrs. Wheeler visited us twice this week.  She taught us about care for babies as well as a lesson about personal space.  I appreciate Mrs. Wheeler's team teaching with our students.

It was fun to celebrate with the whole school watching Frosty the Snowman on Friday.

December is a busy month, please enjoy it.  I look forward to seeing you all on the night of December 12th for our winter concert. 

Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle

                    Immersion in Non-Fiction!

This week, our first full week in November, we began our nonfiction studies!
We are:

• reading nonfiction books during reader's workshop
• researching landforms and bodies of water using info bits on the RMCS webpage
• reading about types of landforms and bodies of water with a variety of literature
• recording our learning with a variety of tools ie: research papers, labeled drawings, bulleted lists, and definitions.
• sharing nonfiction and fiction facts about ourselves in our morning meeting with a question/answer format to figure out which of the statements are fact or fiction.  

During this upcoming week, we will publish this work with postcards, google slides, models, info books and posters.  

This week we enjoyed visitors:

• Miss Megan taught us about the benefits of kale and we enjoyed a dino kale smoothie.  Our students recorded the recipe to bring home.
• We appreciated time to eat together with family and friends at our harvest feast.
• Mrs. Wheeler joined us for our weekly guidance lesson; our focus was about defining public and private then how that relates to our bodies.
• Miss Lauren, Miss Megan and Mr. Foley have been with us one day a week during math time.  They are juniors at St. Michael's College.  

During math time this week we:

• learned to add single and double digits using strategies including the hundreds chart and an open number line.
• practiced our open number line with a spillover strategy into the new decade with addition equations like 38+7.
• introduced string problems with single and double-digit numbers.  
• practiced skills in our students books, our Do The Math packets and our math menus.  All of these items you probably have seen come home in their folders.
• practiced reading time to the hour and half hour on multiple timepieces.

Please look for an email with your conference time.  Let me know if you received it and if it works for you and your family with a quick reply to the email.  

Thank you for all you do,

Jen Belisle

A Week to Celebrate!

Here we are making ghost, pumpkin & Frankenstein slime!

This is such a fun time of year!  Thank you to all of you for supporting our fun on Halloween this week.

Friday we celebrated National Author's Day with our narrative writing celebration!  Here we are reading our stories:

 

  

   

 

We learned about six different patterns in leaves and what types of animals use leaves for food based on the observable patterns with our Hands-On Nature teachers: Mrs. Knoth and Mrs. Almassalkhi!

We completed our read aloud titled The Elevator Family.  

We spend about 30 minutes during the week on a program called Typing Quest.  This program helps us to become strong, accurate, efficient typists.  This skill will assist in all areas of composition as well as research to begin the list.  

Our math focus is about adding 10's and 1's to any number.  We are moving around the hundred chart as well as an open number line to problem solve.  We taught the break apart strategy and how to use landmark numbers when adding two and single digit numbers.  

Ask your child about their word study skill each week & the title(s) of books they enjoy reading at school.  

Please send back the green note about conferences.  If you prefer a time outside of those listed, please let me know.  

Thank you!
Jen Belisle

We Matter!

In this animation, our class is holding their self-designed crayons!  They each chose 4-5 crayon colors to use in our states of matter experiment.  We peeled, melted and recreated a multi-color crayon in a new shape!  Our focus is reversible and irreversible changes. 

We completed our read-aloud of Stuart Little by E.B. White and started our new book, The Elevator Family by Douglas Evans. 

We added new beginnings to our narrative pieces this week as well as completed our drafts. We read Rain Stomper by Addie Boswell to help us learn about precise words, use of size in text and detail.  Our lessons about, "green means growth" allowed us to use a green pen on our writing to edit and add new ideas. 

Our math work this week focused on adding 10 to any number.  We used models like the hundred chart (with and without numbers), digi-blocks and place value pieces. 

We experienced our first full week of small group word study.  Ask your child about it!

Our sharing for the month of October has focused on conversation starters.  Here's a photo of the ones we've shared so far. 

Typing Quest is a tool we are using to teach our students how to type.  Watching my own children and older students with typing expectations, it's so helpful for our students to have this skill.  I have also taught students that we now use a program called Go Guardian.  This allows me, within my Google Classroom, to have access to what is happening on each student's computer at all times. 

Mindfulness this week included a 5 minute guided meditation.  Responses from our students were positive.  Our mindfulness schedule typically includes, coloring a mandala, active & interactive go noodle activity, meditation, breathing exercise, and a sensory activity. 

A note from our school counselor:
Our school counselors, Carol Wheeler and Meaghan Rice are hosting a number of parent coffees this year. They will be here at school on Tuesday mornings, 8:05-8:45, and we hope you will join us for the first one, scheduled for November 6th . As parents, you play the primary role in promoting healthy relationships and preventing child abuse, and it serves our children well when the adults use similar vocabulary and approaches. There will be a short presentation by Lori Howe from Prevent Child Abuse Vermont about the contents of the Healthy Relationships Project we teach at RMCS. We’ll also have time for conversation to help us plan the contents of future get togethers. Young children are welcome, as this is very informal and relaxed time to learn together. Special take home bonus: there will be a free mindfulness tool for your family to add to your home peace corner.

We are looking forward to an exciting upcoming week! 
Thank you to Kelly Knoth and Brittany Almassalkhi for leading Hands on Nature tomorrow.
Thank you for your support in our festivities on Wednesday.


Jen Belisle

A FUN week!

We began our week in a pajama celebration.  Thank you to Mrs. Rice for coming in on Tuesday to create FUN RUN posters to support our schoolmates during our run on Friday.  We ended our week with a fabulous whole school Fun Run event!

Here we are making our posters!

Our mornings are filled with creativity and smiles.

This week we learned about honey bees with Miss Meg & Miss Maddie with Farm to School.  We experienced mindful eating with apples and fresh honey.  Ask your child about some interesting honey bee facts. 

Our classroom community is learning a lot about each other with our daily lightning shares with conversations starters.  They are creating opportunities for continued connections and topics to discuss further.  We are able to group juggle!  We made it to three bean bag frogs so far!

We completed one more week of routine word study.  We will start more focused word study starting on October 22nd.  This upcoming three day week we will review our activities.  

During number corner this month we are looking at both pinnate and palmate leaf patterns, counting minutes in groups of 5, building rectangles with tiles to represent arrays with links to both addition and groups of numbers.  We will continue to build our decade and century counting number lines.  

Mrs. Courcelle, our information technology educator, joined our class twice this week to get us started using Typing Quest and a read/write function on google drive.  

This week we took a math assessment on our first unit.  Students had an opportunity to correct the assessment as well, learning from their mistakes and making thoughtful corrections.

We began our states of matter unit.  We created a chart with ideas we think we know about states of matter and some wonderings we have. We read a non-fiction book to give us some guiding information.  This upcoming week we will have an opportunity to explore at stations and experience for ourselves.  

We are writing our small moment narrative stories with the guidance of sequencing words: First, Next, Then & Last.  We then add details to our stories as we write.  

We read every afternoon.  Each student reads from books in their book box.  We love to read in our classroom.  

I hope you've enjoyed the beauty of this weekend.  

I'm grateful for our classroom communtiy.

Jen Belisle