Growing Learners

This week we completed our All About Me September sharing theme.  During the month of September, we are beginning to build friendships, work partners and a safe, fun place to learn.  During October we will have daily topics for sharing that will help teach conversation skills.  

We are spellers!  Word study began this week.  We set up our routines for a successful year of word study instruction and learning.  We will practice with words as a whole class for one more week to build confidence and independence.  

We are mathematicians! During number corner this week we practiced counting by 10's on our number line, advanced our computation skills with adding strategies of 0,1, doubles, neighbors (+/-) as well as understanding and identifying odd and even numbers.  During math class, we practiced strategies with addition and subtraction while playing Battling Bugs & What's the Difference.  We created bead strings and introduced number lines to model our solutions during problem-solving.  

We are writers!  We created maps of our hearts filled with people, places and things that are meaningful to us.  We read A Chair for my Mother and Stella Tells a Story to help us with strategies to come up with writing topics and how to organize our thinking like writers. We spend time writing every day.  Math Menu includes problem-solving, math practice, responding to a written math prompt as well as generalizing these skills into math situations.  

We are mindful!  This week we colored mandalas, we used the senses of sight and touch to make observations of our "ishis", we participated in mindful movement with go noodle and we practiced breathing, to help us feel our lungs fill while holding our rib cage.

We are readers!  This week we read There was an Old Lady who Swallowed a Fly with different voices, depending on how we felt. We can control our voice as we read a book.  We discovered and uncovered our classroom library.  We labeled bins together and continued to build our reading stamina.   

Our second grades are running the whole school assembly next Friday, October 5th.  It will run from 8:20-8:40 (ish).  Our theme will be to celebrate our Peter Reynolds author study.  I also look forward to seeing you on Thursday night, 6:30-7:30 at Open House.  

The first of our scholastic book order arrived.  I'm anticipating a steady flow of arrivals. When your order arrives I will send it home with your child.

I hope you enjoy the weekend,

Jen Belisle

Happy International Dot Day! 

 We created a dot at the beginning of our journey together and joined more than 12 million people in 177 countries to celebrate making our mark on the world with our trip to Oakledge on Friday.  I'm grateful to be on this journey with your families.

We started our first chapter book read aloud, Stuart Little by E.B. White.  We also read books including Personal Space Camp, Beautiful OOPS as well as Stick and Stone.  Our author study of Peter Reynolds took us to his books titled Going Places, Too Few of Me and The Word Collector.  We learned that Peter is an author and an illustrator. He also creates books with his twin brother, Paul.

We are fortunate to be spending time outside with our second-grade peers.  It's fun to have the sun shining and time to play together.  We are learning group games, cooperative games and spending some free time with each other.

We welcomed Mrs. Jensvold into our class this week.  She's working with all students in math this year.  She read us a book and we explored "ways to make eleven" with each other.  It's a fun game, ask your student to explain it to you.  Our number corner calendar skills are adding to twenty, matching equations with a model and exploring problem-solving.  Each day in math includes a lesson and then time in math menu.

This week we read I am Peace, by Susan Verde & illustrated by Peter Reynolds.  We designed our peace place in our classroom as our activity.  Every day after lunch we spend 10-15 minutes in mindfulness practice.  This past week we took a rainbow walk, colored mandalas, began to use go noodle and highlighted our senses to experience a seashell.

During farm to school this week we learned how to make salsa!  We also played a game to help us understand how long food takes to grow.  We learned that vegetables and fruits can grow in less than a month, 2-3 months or more than 4 months up to multiple years!

I sent home book orders from Scholastic.  It's a choice to purchase books.  If you'd like to place an order, please send the form and a check, made out to Scholastic, back to school by Friday, September 21st.  Our class code to order online, if you'd like, is:
https://clubs.scholastic.com
 the class code is F7RGR 

I hope you had a good weekend.
Jen Belisle

Our Second Week Together!

We began our second week with a welcome back greeting at our morning meeting.  It was great to see everyone again after the Labor Day weekend.  This week we began sharing with our All About Me theme, it's fun getting to know each other through this process.  Thank you for your help putting together the 4-5 items to share.  We also played a game called "Roll a Topic" I sent home an example thinking that this may be a fun way to have conversations about school at home, you could change the theme to represent whatever topic you'd like.

 During our math time, we began our week exploring clocks.  As mathematicians we learned about inventory, it's purpose, different strategies to use and ways to count. We also created as many shapes as we could with isosceles triangles following 4 constraints, we came up with at least 7 ways.  I sent a copy of this home, just in case you wanted to try it together.  Our class is making creative, intelligent observations on our number corner calendar this month.

Our author study, to kick off our school year, is Peter Reynolds.  This week we read The Dot, Ish, Happy Dreamer & Sky Color.  We used watercolors to create dots, we used quiver vision to make a dot 3D and we sang The Dot Song, multiple times.  I've added the link to my sidebar if you'd like to listen.

We enjoyed playing second-grade community games outside at the end of each day.  It's fun to play tag games together.

Our STEM activity this week was called Help Harry.  Our class not only created perches from limited materials, they also listened to each team explain their process and compliment them on something they did well.

Our field trip to celebrate Dot Day at Oakledge is Friday, September 14th.  We will be out of the building 8:45-:12:15.  We will be back at school in time for our early dismissal at 12:30.  We will eat a bag lunch, from home, at Oakledge.  No chaperones are needed for this trip.

I'm so excited for our first Monday together!  I hope you had a great weekend.

Jen Belisle

Our First Week Together

I'm thrilled to be teaching second grade and embark on this journey with your children.  Our first four days have been filled with opportunities to learn about each other, our space, our team and our school.  I appreciate that you all came to our Open House on Monday, August 27th, it was exciting to meet everyone face to face.  

Reading, watching and experiencing the creative ways of sharing about your children with the UDL projects is both inspiring and insightful.  I've received a bag of pictures and significant symbols, top ten lists, videos, photos and thoughtful letters.  I am a fortunate educator to be working with such amazing children and families.  Thank you. 

This week we've read books together to create a positive culture for learning and growing; some titles include: Mary Wore Her Red Dress, First Day Jitters, Chrysanthemum, Me First, Giraffe's Can't Dance and The Wednesday Surprise.  Reading these books lead to projects like drawing our "best person" and writing our "best name".  We created mosaic representations of our own names that we will hang in our room.  We created a list of birthday options for our gift of time and I've posted that list on the right side of our blog home page. 

We are spending time together as a grade level playing a variety of tag games outside.  We've played rainbow tag, mosquito tag, under the bridge tag as well as fruit salad tag.  It's fun to be together as a team.  The whole second grade will be going to Oakledge Park to celebrate International Dot Day on Friday, September 14th.  We will take the bus at 8:45 and return for our 12:30 early dismissal.  We don't need chaperones for this event. We will eat our bag lunch in the park.  

Our week of inspirational math began with a quick video to teach about brain growth, perseverance, making mistakes, believing in yourself and that speed doesn't matter.  Our learning has included experiences like: crossing our midline with math mazes, flexible thinking with dot numbers, creating shapes from other shapes and designing pictographs with opposite qualities.  

Our STEM challenge to create a paper chain was a cooperative success!  Our whole chain is 131 links and 312 inches in length.  

Our school expectations to be: Respectful, Mindful and Cooperative to be Successful is a consistent conversation as we develop our classroom community.  We are earning Marky Marks and will set our goal this week.  

Each student has a mailbox. I taught them how to pack their folders on Friday.  Please send the folder back to school on Tuesday.  It will come home this coming Friday as well.

Please note that picture day is Wednesday, September 5th.  We are the first class to have our photos taken at 8:30 am.

I hope you are all enjoying the three day weekend.

Jen Belisle