May has arrived!

May is a month for flowers and our second grade is the growing place!  Check out these photos and videos of the flowering plants for our pollinator garden in our grow lab. This first video and picture series is from April vacation.

These are our beautiful plants as of the first week in May!

We are excited to be growing these plants for our pollinator garden habitat.  We look forward to welcoming bees, bats, butterflies, and birds to help pollination occur and support the resurgence of the pollinators to our area.

Speaking of pollination, we dissected an alstroemeria flower this week.  We labeled the parts of the flower and described the process of pollination.  We glued and labeled the petals, sepal, stamen, pistil, pollen, and ovary of the alstroemeria flower in our science notebooks.  

The flowers we planted went directly into the soil.  On Friday we began the process of germination with some pole beans.    This process will help us all see the strength and power of the bean seed as it germinates in our window.  






As mathematicians, we are building numbers with place value pieces, using expanded notation, symbolic notation as well as writing the word names of numbers.  We are problem-solving with situations involving numbers within 1000.  We started our unit test on Friday with a focus on addition, subtraction, place value, money and problem solving.

As writers, we are strengthening our foundation skills of writing sentences.  Students are writing complete, simple and compound sentences, with a capital letter, punctuation, subject, and predicate. We have been writing for a variety of purposes as well as some skill practice.  

During our reader's workshop time we are using a shared reading to support writing summaries of our reading.  We are also enjoying some reading time in partnerships as well as independently.  

This sign was drawn and placed on our bathroom door.  "This is an everyone bathroom because we all use it."  Honestly, could I be more grateful for such a phenomenal group of accepting, thoughtful, intelligent and inspired students? 

I hope you have a great week!
Thank you for all that you do,
Jen Belisle

Spring is Here!  

We welcomed our final life science unit of relationships between plants and animals within a habitat by designing, planting and creating our own habitat, a pollinator garden!  We are calling it the "B" garden, it's for bees, butterflies, bats, and birds.  So far we started our process in our grow lab.  Each student chose four plants out of our eight recommendations.  Here are Nana, Ryan, Mrs. Hock and Ms. Bryce helping to plant two types of flowers each.  Our garden will have sunflowers, cosmos, borage, ageratum, verbena, nasturtium, calendula & zinnias.  We are looking for some mature milkweed & echinacea (coneflower) that we can replant into our garden if you have access to any and would be willing to share.  

 

These pictures show the growth as of Monday this week!  I have videos for updating our students about what happened over vacation!

 

This week we also said goodbye to Miss Meg, our Farm to School educator.  She is now pursuing her education degree!  We are so excited for her next adventures, though we will miss her very much as our farm to school teacher.  This week she taught and helped us create vegetarian chili. You can access all the farm to school recipes on our rmcs homepage, under the scrolling pictures by clicking on the leaf icon.

 

We also said goodbye to Ms. Bryce.  What an amazing experience we have had with such a wonderful educator!  These are photos of our family style pizza lunch together.  Thank you Barry!  We also ate cake. Thank you Claire and Carrie!  We shared a compliment circle and she opened up all of her books. Thank you Brittany!

   It was an emotional afternoon full of good tidings, good stories and good moments.   

 

I hope you are all enjoying some time together.  I'm excited to see you all on Monday!

Thank you for all you do,
Jen Belisle

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