News from Room 15

October 20, 2019

Frost on the ground to STEAM in the classroom!

I have our releases for pictures for our blog!  I'm so excited to share these wonderful photos with you of our learning in second grade.  Let's start with our Wildflowers STEAM lesson.  Thank you to Erin Mateo and Damaris Martinez for teaching us about balance, gravity, tinkering, creativity and helping us to practice our growth mindset!

 

 

 

 

 

 

We learned:

    *Two new word study activities: sound boxes and two-word rhyme poems.  The word wizards in our classroom are creative and deep thinkers!

  *Our classroom loves to write!  We have drafted our first personal narrative stories with illustrations.  We are writing over multiple pages using sequencing words to help us: First, Next, Then, Last.  We read Shortcut by Donald Crews as a Mentor Text to help us add detail to our stories.

  *We took a unit one post-test in math.  I will review them with each student this week as part of the teacher station in our math menu.  

  *We started our Reading Menu.  Each day, after our lesson, our students read independently, with a teacher and then they may choose one of the activities involving speaking, listening, reading and writing. 

   We experienced:

   *RMCS third grade invited us to an assembly about raising money to support schools in Honduras.

   *Ms. Amblo introduced us to Slo Moe, her sloth.  The sloth helps us to remember to slow down, look around and breathe.  We all made sloths with our hands and put them around the classroom as a reminder.  

   *Reading Are You My Monster by Amanda Noll and Horrible Harry by Suzy Kline.

   *Counted cubes in our classroom with the SBHS SLAM community service team.  They helped each table count into the hundreds using the strategy of making and counting by 10's.

   *Pinnate and Palmate are words we can use to describe the leaves falling around us.  We are counting by 3's and 4's in our number corner calendar as well.

   *We are collecting 5 minutes each day in number corner as we move the minute hand around the clock.  
*We start our afternoon learning a new mindful movement, involving breathing and stretching. 

   *We introduced an Atlas this week and our students finished a scavenger hunt to help them discover what's inside.

Other things to ask your child about:

Group Juggling, Hot and Cold and the Blanket Name Game

Creative Arts classes

Recess choices

Please note

Thank you for sending in a white t-shirt to tie-dye as part of an all-school event the week of October 28th.

Thank you for sending in some pennies for our penny drive. 

I hope you enjoy the weekend,

Mrs. Belisle

The week of new

September 27, 2019
Autumn Begins!

News from Room 15

September 27, 2019

We learned:

    New word study routines with our new word study notebooks.
·      How to gather tiny topics for writing in our new notebooks
·      Routines for have to's and choices during math menu with our new math menu folders

   We experienced:

·      Math menu with corrections and Dreambox
·      Reading aloud Best Friends by Steven Kellogg, Ricky the Rock that Couldn't Roll by Jason Miletsky, Duck! Rabbit! by Amy Rosenthal, The Screaming Mean Machine by Joy Cowley and Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse by Kevin Henkes
·      Solving problems with missing addends, counting to the century by 10's and practicing addition facts in number corner.
·      Practicing our classroom rules and agreements together.
·      Mindfulness practice with multiple senses, incorporating the skills we learned this month to help become more aware of ourselves in our space.
    Science STEAM challenge of building the longest paper chain.
    Building our Reader's workshop routines.
    Counting Strategies with counting bags and recording totals.

Other things to ask your child about:

·      Bookflix and Dreambox on our chromebooks

·      Snackcess

·      Book choices

Please note
Our classroom is keeping clean and healthy with baby wipes and kleenex. Thank you for your continued donations.

I hope you enjoy the weekend,

Mrs. Belisle

jbelisle@sbschools.net

A New Start

News from Room 15

September 15, 2019

We learned:

·      How to practice taking deep breaths.

·      Our classroom procedures for:  packing our folders with our mail from our mailboxes and returning empty folders to school.

·      How a monarch emerges from its chrysalis, we let our monarch free this week, we called her “a new start”.

We experienced:

·      Math menu with have to’s and choices.

·      Reading aloud Katie Woo by Fran Manushkin

·      Learning to tell time by collecting minutes and hours in number corner.

·      Writing our classroom rules and agreements together.

·      Reading The Golden Rule by Ilene Cooper and I am Peace by Susan Verde.

·      Practicing together as a second grade and running the assembly about mindfulness.

·      Reading Stick and Stone by Beth Ferry and creating a class book about how we can stick up for our friends.

·      mindfulness practice with our hands noticing how our sense of touch is emphasized when we can’t use our other senses as well as building vocabulary to describe how things feel.

Other things to ask your child about:

·      Introduction to chromebook use

·      Our all school recess

·      Lunchroom choices, who are they sitting with, how’s it going?

Please note:

·      Friday, September 20^th – Early Release at 12:30 p.m.

I hope you enjoyed the weekend,

Mrs. Belisle

jbelisle@sbschools.net

**We are brave and kind in our classroom.  Each member of our class was both of these this week in many ways.