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