Post 8

IMPORTANT DATES:

October 24th-November 4th: Fall Conferences - It has been great meeting with all of you to discuss your child's progress and I look forward to meeting with those of you who have future conferences. If you have not already signed up, please sign-up for a conference on Sign-Up Genius and note that conferences are for adults only.

November 3rd: 12:30 dismissal 

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 7 or December 1st from 6:30-8:30: 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, 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!  

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 on Tuesday, 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: Thank you for your increased participation with this! Many children came in with words to share and our sharing was quite rich! Please continue to make it part of your daily routine. 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!

CURRICULUM UPDATE:

In reading we: 

• Read The School Mouse by Dick King Smith and Ira Says Goodbye by Bernard Waber. 
• 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. 

At home, have books talks with your child. If you have already had your conference, please use the red bookmark that you received for question ideas. Also, as you are reading, "think aloud" to help them notice you using the same strategies that they are learning at school, such as activating prior knowledge about a topic or making connections to a text. Say things like, "This reminds me of the time..." or "This reminds me of the part in The Cricket in Times Square when..." Also, please discuss rich vocabulary that you find in the books you are reading. Have your child record these on their wow word worksheet and see if you can use some of these words in your daily conversations.  

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

In Fundations (Word Study) we: 

• Reviewed glued sounds 
• Practiced making and writing words with bonus letters and glued sounds
• Trick words: shall, full, pull, walk, talk, both

At home, 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 needs 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 continued playing with our stories to add details. We are using Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and The Leaving Morning by Angela Johnson as our guides.  

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 study imagery, tension and literary language in Owl Moon by Jane Yolen and practice these techniques in our writing.

In math we:

• Worked on our fact power by practicing with fact triangles, naming numbers in various ways, building fact families with dominoes, and playing games such as Beat the Calculator, Subtraction Salute and Addition Top-It.

Next week, we will take our unit 2 math assessment and begin the next unit on place value, money and time. 

At home, continue to work on fact fluency. You can use games, such as Math Facts Basketball on ABCYa.com. They also have games connected to the next unit on money, time and place value. If  your child needs practice with these concepts, please check them out. 

In Science we:

• Engineered seeds that travel by wind and hitchhiking. Many of the wind travelers were light, had wings or had parachutes. The hitchhikers were sticky or spiky in some way.
• Classified the seed collections that your children brought in. 

This concluded our How Seeds Travel unit. Next week, we will begin our first Social Studies unit: USA and Geography.

Have a great weekend!