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