Post 7

IMPORTANT DATES:

This weekend!!!: Playground Community Build - Our school's playground community build is this weekend and your child's school community needs your help! Please consider signing up for 1 or more time slots to help. Donating a few hours of your time this weekend will provide many, many hours of enjoyment for your child this year and in the years to come. Thank you to those who have already signed up! Let's get our community together and build this playground for our kids!

** As you sign up, please note that no one under the age of 18 will be permitted at the site, so please arrange for childcare. 

October 24th-November 4th: Fall Conferences - Fall conferences are here! Thanks to those who have signed up! If you have not already done so, please sign-up for a conference on Sign-Up Genius and note that conferences are for adults only.

October 27th: Flu Clinic - The Memorial Spaulding Flu Clinic will be held October 27, 2016. Parents may sign students up to receive the flu vaccine at no charge by returning consent and screening forms to the school nurse. MDPH is providing Flucelvax, a quadrivalent, cell-based flu vaccine, for our students. The nasal spray flu vaccine, FluMist, will not be offered this year due to updated recommendations from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The forms are due October 25, 2016. Forms and additional information are available online at www.newtonma.gov/flu or in the school nurse’s office.

November 7th: Our book fair preview - We will be previewing the school book fair on 11/7. After our preview, your child should come home with a written or mental list of books that s/he would be interested in purchasing at our book fair. 

November 9th from 2:15-2:45: Book fair classroom visit - This is our time to purchase books at the school book fair. If you and your child choose to purchase books at the book fair, please send in your child's money on this day in an envelope labeled with your child's name, my name (Ms. E-J) and book fair $. If you are able to join us during this time, it would be much appreciated!  

November 11th: Veteran's Day - NO SCHOOL  

REMINDERS: 

Homework: Homework will be sent home beginning 11/1/16. In the meantime, please work with your child to find or create a comfortable place for him/her to do homework and determine how homework will fit into your afternoon/evening routine. Each night, students will have 3 pieces to complete: 1 math, 1 literacy and 20 minutes of reading. A packet will be sent home on Monday and will be returned on Friday. Here is a link to an article about ways to help your child with homework at home. 


Wow words: Each Wednesday in our class is Wow Word Wednesday. Our Wednesday morning work is to write and decorate a Wow Word and we need your help with this. During the week, as you are reading and talking with your child, there will be words that are new to him/her. I encourage your children to inquire about these unfamiliar words and I would like you to do the same, as this is one way your child can be in control of his/her own learning. These new vocabulary words are wow words - words that they can teach the class so that we are all increasing our vocabulary! Please help your child to learn what these wow words mean (Here is a link to Merriam Webster for kids - Word Central). If it is helpful to your child to help learn these words, s/he can jot them down on the Wow Word worksheet in our child's folder. If your child encounters many wow words each week, feel free to have him/her write them on the sheet, but they will pick 1 word to teach us each week. Here is a link to the wow word worksheet in case you need a new one.

Parent Volunteers:  If you are interested and available to volunteer with in-school tasks (such as photocopying, laminating and cutting materials, organizing materials, fixing classroom library books, etc.) and/or out-of-school tasks (such as helping with the Scholastic Book Order, helping to organize our classroom library by labeling books, picking up photos for our class from CVS, etc.) please email me to let me know. Thank you so much to those who have helped out already and those who have offered to volunteer! It truly takes a village!

Responsive Home Workshop: The Social and Emotional Learning Department of the Newton Public Schools will be sponsoring Responsive Home Workshops for families to help you create a calm, supportive and encouraging environment at home. This workshop goes hand in hand with the Responsive Classroom work that we are doing in the classroom. Although I have never attended one of these workshops, however I have attended a week-long Responsive Classroom workshop with the presenter, Amy Kelly, and it was phenomenal! I am planning to put on my mom-hat and attend one of these workshops myself just to see what it is all about!  

CURRICULUM UPDATE:

In reading we: 

• Read The School Mouse by Dick King Smith, Stellaluna by Janell Cannon, and Zipping, Zapping, Zooming Bats by Ann Earle.
• Continued practicing activating our schema before reading, using both fiction and non-fiction texts 
• Continued practicing using sticky notes to show our thinking (questioning, predicting, making connections, summarizing, inferring and solving words) while reading.
• Practiced making connections (text-to-self, text-to-text and text-to-world) connections to help us comprehend a text. 

When reading with your child at home, have books talks with your child. Ask them what they already know about a topic before reading a book or invite them to share any connections they have when reading. You can share your connections, too. Say things like, "This reminds me of the time..." or "This reminds me of the part in The Cricket in Times Square when..."  

Next week, we will continue practicing making connections to help us comprehend fiction and non-fiction texts. 

In Fundations (Word Study) we: 

• Took our unit 1 assessment
• Practiced identifying closed syllables 
• Reviewed bonus letters
• Trick words: shall, full, pull

Please refer to the  Unit 2 family letter to learn how you can support our word study work at home. Also, look though the fundations-word study section on my website. There, you will find all of the first and second grade trick words. If your child need practice with these words, please practice through activities such as playing bingo, memory or through reviewing them on flashcards.

In writing we: 

• Continued our work on writing small moment stories. We practiced planning our stories and learned to include details.  

At home, continue to support your child's use of his/her tiny topic notebook. Here is the bit on tiny topic notebooks from the previous blogs if you need a refresher: We are learning that authors often get their ideas from events that occur in their lives. To help us remember meaningful moments in our lives, we each received a tiny topic notebook. These notebooks will go to and from school in your child's folder and are a place for your child to jot down meaningful moments that s/he may want to turn into a Small Moment story for writing. If you notice a meaningful moment, please note it with your child. You could say something like, "That was such a meaningful moment. That would make a great Small Moment story." and suggest that s/he jot it on the tiny topic notebook.

Next week, we will work on rereading our stories to make sure they make sense and setting goals for our writing. We will continue to use Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and The Leaving Morning by Angela Johnson as our guides.

In math we:

• Reviewed turn-around facts (ask your child why they give you fact power)
• Learned the +9 shortcut. We noticed a pattern that the one's place in the sum is always one less than the ones place in the other addend. We also saw that we can think of 9 as 10-1, so if we know how to quickly add 10 to any number, we can easily add 9, too!
• Practiced subtraction. 
• Learned about the 3 read strategy for number stories. This helps us to really understand what number stories are asking so that we can solve them thoughtfully.
• Held our first math congress, where we share our big math ideas.

Next week, we will continue working on addition and subtraction number facts.

In Science we:

• Dissected seeds and learned about the 3 parts of a seed.
• Learned about how seeds travel.
• Collected seeds in nature and sorted some by how they might have travelled. 

Ask your child about the different ways that seeds travel. When you are out and about, you could ask your child how they think different plants began growing in their locations.

In Mindfulness we:

• learned how to be leaders of mindful minutes in class. 

In Open Circle we:

• Read Nobody Knew What to Do by Becky Rae McCain and discussed that when we see someone being hurt or someone is hurting us, it’s important to take care of them or ourselves by letting an adult know. 
• Discussed how to handle annoying behaviors.
• Discussed befriending classmates who are teased or left out. 

At home, ask your child about these lessons and have open discussions about these open circle topics. 

Next week, we will discuss how to report if students are hurting each other outside of the classroom.