Thank you to our students and families!

Wow! I can't believe that my time at Rick Marcotte is almost up!  I want to sincerely thank you for your support and encouragement during my time student teaching.  Your children have been such gifts to me.  They are passionate, kind, and creative thinkers.  I have learned so much from them!  I keep reassuring the students that they will see me around and that I will keep track of all of their future accomplishments.  I can't wait to see the wonderful things that they will do. 

In mathematics, we are working with numbers within 1000.  Our problem solving, counting on and counting back skills are helping us add and subtract.  We are counting by 10's and 100's to help us estimate and facilitate our use of the number line.  1000 can look small and 1000 can look really big!  

 Tables work together to count to 1000 cubes.  

 

The past two weeks we have had a lot of fun with our learning.  We started our Poetry Unit,
We looked at poetry books with our partners and explored! 

 

 

 We are writing couplets, quatrains and exploring with the art of rhyme.  

We visited Mrs. Bailey's third grade class this week to listen to the nonfiction books their students wrote.  We learned about Nepal, pets, math, paper airplanes, Minecraft, the solar system and so much more.  

 

 

 


It was a great opportunity to visit the third grade classrooms, meet a teacher and take some time to notice similarities and differences.  We did stop by the bathrooms on the way back, one of the observations was that there aren't bathrooms in the classrooms starting in third grade, so we visited the ones they will use next year.  

Congratulations to our scientists at the science fair!  What a wonderful display and learning opportunity.  

I think spring may have arrived.  I'm sending home snowpants..... Boots may be helpful if it's muddy.  We will be going outside for snackcess and recess again.  We want students to enjoy time outside.

Thank you for all you do.  
Mrs. Belisle and Ms. Bryce.  

We are back in action...and it's not an April Fools joke!

Thank you so much to Kristen Courcelle, our Information Technology Educator in South Burlington, she's amazing.

Our Taiko Performance, following our two-week artist in residence, was a huge success!  Thank you to Paton Sensei from the Burlington Taiko Group as well as our PTO and Mrs. Rito for this experience.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1w_b1GxAb_ShbbNLlZNKIMkj1ZyAUyS2r/view?usp=sharing

Please click the link above for a 3 minute video of our performance.  Thank you to Colin Belisle for taking the video!

We are changing the world with our opinions, one letter at a time!  We walked to the US Post Office on White Street in South Burlington to mail our opinion letters.  We worked hard in our persuasive writing unit.  This was a fun way to publish our work and celebrate spring at the same time.  Thank you to Officer Bri for helping us safely cross Williston Road.

 

Thank you to Anita's Mom Brittany and Kyle's Mom, Kelly for teaching our class about squirrels in our Hands-on-Nature lesson this month.  We were able to identify a squirrel skull vs. the skull of a mink, a variety of squirrel pelts, some math problem solving about flying (gliding) squirrels and lots of information about how squirrels survive in the puppet show.  

Ms. Nancy completed our Math Through Art residency with an activity that focused on the idea of half of a rectangle.  Our display, with our observations, will be in the hallway for you to see during parent-teacher conferences.  

Ms. Bryce will be completing her student teaching journey with us as a solo teacher starting next week.  I am confident in her skills and I'm excited about the learning opportunities she has planned for our students.  

Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle & Kylie Bryce

Parades, Paton Sensei, Pi Day & Persuasion!

Parades, Paton Sensei, Pi Day & Persuasion!

Click on the videos below to see our parade.

We started our week with our State Parade!  Mr. Coon, holding our state banner, led us through student filled hallways.  We came together as a community to celebrate hard work, cooperation, research, and presentation.  I am so proud of our students!

We are focused on writing our persuasive pieces with skills including using multiple reasons for evidence, statements that include the because and writing to a specific audience about a topic we feel strongly about.  I'm inspired by our student's vision.  

3.14 at 1:59 (the first 6 digits of pi are 3.14159) we finished our celebration of pi day!  We created pi landscapes and colored concentric circles.  We read the book titled Sir Cumference and the Dragon of Pi by Cindy Neuschwander.  

Paton Sensei met with our classes every day for 30 minutes.  We learned about two ways to sit, how to respectfully respond, how to raise our hand straight and sit up straight.  We learned the importance of focus and following directions.  We learned that Paton Sensei valued each of our names.  We did all that and experiences Taiko drumming!  Wow.

 
 




























Thank you for your patience,
Jen Belisle

Welcome Back

We had a busy first few days back at school!  Cooperation, research, creativity, concentration combined with art supplies, symbols and lots of glue allowed for some state floats that are worthy of a parade!  We will parade through the school Monday morning at 10:15.  We are parading for all of the students at RMCS.  We will video the event to share with families.  Below is a sneak peek of our second-grade learning and hard work!

 
 
 
 
 
 

We completed our fun week with a trip to the Flynn Theater to see Rosie Revere Engineer.  We read the book first and enjoyed our trip together to experience live performance. 

 

When we returned to school we walked into the kick off assembly of the Burlington Taiko Drum Group!  Here is our Ila up on the drum!

 

Your children are amazing. 
Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle

Cheering for so many Successes!

Here we are at the UVM game. Wahoo! We had a fantastic time cheering on the Catamount Women's Basketball Team on Wednesday.


Our measurement unit brought us to the hallway!  We are measuring with inches, feet, and yards!



Our crafternoon making 3D rainbows was so much fun!  We measured consecutive size rainbow strips onto our cloud background.  Math, art & cooperation makes for wonderful learning time.  







Valentine's Day was overflowing with love and kindness!  Thank you to all of our families for supporting our pancake breakfast.  Thank you for sending in the amazing, thoughtful, fun valentines as well.  We have such an amazing group of students to celebrate every day.  

Our geography unit will close with a state parade!  We have painted our state floats and we are researching about our states.  We will complete our float creation during the three days we return from vacation.  Our parade will be on Monday, March 11th at 10:15. You are welcome to join us.  We will also video it and upload the link.  

Have a great vacation.  See you back at school on Wednesday, March 6th.

Learning, Growing and Celebrating Together!

We completed the month of January with our nonfiction publishing party!  We celebrated each nonfiction writer in Mrs. Belisle and Mrs. Hock's classroom by reading each writing piece and sharing positive feedback about their writing on our Publishing Party Positives sheet.  Each student chose a lollipop flavor based on a skill they felt brought "flavor" to their nonfiction writing.  

Our new writing unit is opinion writing.  We are writing about our favorite books and authors to kick off this unit.  Our learning is about creating sentences of opinion, providing evidence to support our opinions and using illustrations to help guide our understanding.  This week we wrote letters to future readers of these books as well as authors and illustrators to excite, share gratitude and opinions about the books!  

As mathematicians, we started our unit on measurement.  We have measured with a teacher foot and transferred that nonstandard unit of measure to the knowledge that one foot = 12 inches.  We measured with yards, learning that 3 feet = 1 yard.  We made inchworm rulers!  We are measuring items both large and small, estimating and measuring to compare.  

We are singing The Fifty Nifty United States as we learn about the geography of the United States of America.  This week we used political maps and labeled one with state abbreviations, physical maps to identify landforms and levels, and a map of national parks supported by google earth to share some of the beauty in these places. We are looking for donations of photocopy boxes, with the lid, for a final state project. We will need one box for each student.  Thank you!

We celebrated the 100th day of learning together.  We took new photos in our 100.  We counted 100 items, we skip counted by 100's.  We added to our memory books to share how smart we are.

Flat Stanley's continue to arrive!  We are learning so much about the United States from your kind contacts, their enthusiastic responses, and letters.  Each time a new Flat Stanley arrives we display them on the map in the hallway.  We look forward to each letter we continue to receive.  

Thank you for all of your donations and time as we celebrate Valentine's Day this coming Thursday.  We will decorate Valentine bags in advance so the students can share their valentine's with each other.  

Thank you for all you do,

Jen Belisle