Sunday, January 25, 2015

Measuring Up!!



Dear Parents,

Room 5 has had another BUSY week!!  This short week was filled with lots of learning.  


Math
In math we continued our work in measuring.  We moved from measuring in metric units (meters and centimeters) to using the English units of measure.  These units included yards, feet, and inches.  Throughout the week we spent time estimating, measuring, and drawing lines to specific measurements.  Measurement was also the focus of our word problems this week.
Drawing lines in inches.
Yes, students did draw the lines on their tables!



















Homework
Monday--Word Problem Worksheet
Tuesday--IXL U.2 Halves, Thirds, and Fourths
Wednesday--IXL U.3 Identify the Fraction
Thursday--No homework (Assessment)

Writing

In writing the authors of Room 5 continued our focus on the writing trait of Ideas.  Students reviewed their narrowed and focused idea.  We discussed the importance of bringing our idea to life with interesting details that are related to our topic.  Students listened to the story, All the Places to Love by Patricia Mac Lachlan.  This story was read to students the first time with me just reading the main story line.  I then read it again, this time reading the entire book with all it's rich details.  The power of interesting, related details was very evident from this activity.  With all this information, students finally started writing on their chosen topic with a focus on ideas.  I can't wait to start conferencing with students on this writing!

Language
Our work with adverbs continued.  Students are getting better at identifying and classifying adverbs by if they are telling when, how, or where.  Over the week students practiced through a whole class physical sort.  Students were given a card with an adverb.  They then went to a designated place in the classroom based on whether their adverb told when, how, or where.  Students then completed the sort on paper.  Students will be testing on adverbs this coming week.

Projects

Our work in projects continued this week with reviewing information on gas and exploring the properties of liquid.  Students are working on a matter book, which will be completed this coming week.





The Scientists in Room 5 exploring the the properties of liquids.
Students have enjoyed the switch to projects focused on Science.  The week ahead will be filled with more matter investigations.

Community Service
Our Community Service Teacher, Mrs. Sheldon is amazing.  The students have been creating art for the Senior Center. They have also been making projects that go along with the Meals on Wheels delivery.  Each project focuses on a fun, silly holiday.  This week students were preparing goodies for National Puzzle Day which is on January 29th!
Students putting together "Winter" artwork for the Senior Center!
Puzzle Piece creations!!



















Here's wishing everyone a great week, I know I'm looking forward to it!!

Sincerely,
Anne Bloomfield

Here is the reading information from Mrs. Jackson.

Hello to all my second grade parents!


This weekend I attended a wonderful training with Mrs. Loop and Mrs. Marsh.  I learned strategies to use with informational text and different ways to organize informative writing.  Did you know that when we read on the internet, over 90% of what we read iis informational text?  Also, as we all know, most middle, high school and college texts are all informative.  Research says that we need to spend 50% of our time in the classroom with informative text and 50% with fiction text.  This will enable our young learners to be ready for the reading they will be required to do in the future.  Our classroom includes both types of literature.  I have noticed that during independent reading time, most students choose to read informative text versus narrative text.  

I also learned about the use of visual literacy in the classroom!  Visual literacy includes examining, discussing, critically analyzing and learning through the use of visual images.  It turn out that we have 1,000,000 optical nerves attached to our brains and only 30,000 auditory ones.  This shows the importance of images as well as text in our learning and cognitive growth. This ties right into what we have been doing. We have been reviewing the way that pictures, captions and headings to understand that each feature gives us new information.  This week we will learn from diagrams (within this, I will include some of my new learning about visual features in general).  All of this learning has been while utilizing informative texts on animals.  Our small group animal research will continue this Thursday.  

We will also be discussing and utilizing different strategies to find out the meanings of unknown words.  We will learn how to reread text, how to read ahead and reviewing the use of the glossary.  

We will continue reviewing prefixes and suffixes and our Word Family this week will contain words using “old”.  

It is hard to believe that it is the end of January.  Where is that snow?  

I am looking forward to a fun week full of learning and growing this week.

Sincerely,


Kristen Jackson



Sunday, January 18, 2015

Week of January 20th


Martin Luther King, Jr.

Dear Parents,

With the long Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday weekend, I hope you found some time to have some fun family adventures.  The weeks are so busy, it is really nice to have an extra day once in awhile.  I was fortunate enough to take my son skiing for his first time and my first time in about 12 years.  It was so much fun to revisit a sport and to share it with my son.  I very much looking forward to many more skiing days.  

They say that a picture is worth a thousand words.  I'm very excited to mention that I have finally taken the time to figure out how to post pictures to my blog.  So hopefully every week, I'll have some some photos to go along with my descriptions of the week's activities.

Math
Our work with measurement continued with measuring using centimeters.  As we have been measuring, students are taking the time to make estimates before taking the actual measurement.  I must say students are doing a great job with the estimations!!  They are really thinking about the units of measure we have used so far (meters and centimeters) and making very reasonable estimations. This tends to be a difficult concept for 2nd graders, but these kiddos are rocking it!


Measuring in nonstandard units (paper clips)
Measuring in centimeters.

                                                  




                                                     











                             Students learned how to measure curved lines.  They explored a few different strategies and finally were given a different tool (a cloth tape measure) to help them measure curved lines. They were able to practice this by measuring body parts such as their wrist, ankles, elbows, knees, and head (see picture above).  Our work with measurement will continue next week with inches, feet, and yards.
Homework
Mon.         No School
Tues.        IXL S.3 Which Customary Unit of Length is Appropriate?
Wed.         IXL S.2 Measure Using an Inch Ruler
Thurs.       Worksheet Test B

Writing
In writing the students of Room 5 are beginning to work on narratives.  Our focus for the past week has been in the writing trait of Ideas.  Students have decided on a topic that they will be writing on and we have worked on narrowing down that topic so that our writing will be very specific and concise .  For example a broad topic might be "fishing".  This topic could be narrowed down to the time a student went fishing and caught more fish than anyone else in the family.  

Language
Our time in language focused on adverbs.  We have studied adjectives and students understand that adjectives describe nouns.  Adverbs are a little bit trickier.  We are learning that adverbs can describes a verb, adjective, or another adverb.  They describe WHEN, HOW, and WHERE.  So far students have watched a School House Rock video, read and discussed an Adverb Poem, and we have been listing adverbs on a Tree Map to display in our room as a resource.  This week will continue to review and identify adverbs within sentences.

Projects
With the new semester, students started working in science for Project time.  Students have been working through the Scientific Method as we have been learning about the properties of matter.  This past we have completed experiments proving that gas takes up space and liquids take on the shape of it's container.  Eventually student scientists will be designing and demonstrating their own experiment focused on the reversible or irreversible changes that occur when matter is heated or cooled.

Here's a few words from Mrs. Jackson...
2nd Grade

Happy Martin Luther King Jr. Day!

January 18, 2015

Welcome back from your long weekend!  

This quarter in our Reading block we are learning how take notes about a specific animal using a non-fiction article.  We begin by activating our schema (or prior knowledge) about this animal.  We then read our article, confirming the information that we’d previously believed to be true (as well as clearing up any misconceptions we might have had).  After this, we take new notes focusing on specific areas including: diet, lifestyle, physical characteristics and interesting facts.

Right now, we are doing this together in small groups, but students will do this individually as this quarter progresses. This week in our mini lessons we will be learning how readers gather additional information about a topic by reviewing the diagrams in a text

We will not have a new Word Family this week since it is a short week.

You may also notice that your child is bringing home new books as part of their nightly assigned reading.   These books were just recently purchased with the money that our school raised from the Scholastic Book Fair this fall!  Thank you for your support and for the brand new books-how exciting for us all!

Also, on a side note:  Due to student educational needs, Mrs. Bloomfield and myself are making a schedule change.  Currently we start our day with the 2nd grade class in math (8:15-9:35 am).  Starting on Tuesday, January 20th, 2nd grade students will be in reading from 8:15-9:35 am and math from 9:55-11:30 am.  

I am excited to have your child for Reading at the very beginning of the day.
Please feel free to contact me anytime.  Thanks for your support!

Sunday, January 11, 2015

New Year, New Semester, and New Quarter



Winter Wonderland Stock 29 by


Dear Parents,

New year, new semester, new quarter, It was a very busy first week back!! Students came back to new tablemates and a new room arrangement. Between lots of new pieces, being back with friends, and a surprise birthday celebration for me it was an extra busy week!!

Math
We started the new year out with our unit on measuring length. Our week began with students using nonstandard units to measure classroom objects. Students enjoyed using different nonstandard units to measure the object. We were then able to discuss why an object measured with different nonstandard units had different measurements.

After spending time with nonstandard units, students got some practice estimating and measuring lengths to the nearest meter. Finally we worked on some word problems that involved meters. Our work in math took a little longer than expected, so our assessment was put off until Monday.

Here's the homework for the week.

Mon.-IXL S.10 Metric Units of Length--Word Problems
Tues.-IXL S. 8 Measure Using a Centimeter Ruler
Wed.-Practice Test B
Thurs.-No Homework (Assessment)

Writing
The students completed a very short but technology filled writing assignment using the acronym JOY. The J stands for something the student just did, the O stands for one thing the student wants to improve in, and the Y stands for something special about you. Students spent time talking and sharing their responses to the 3 statements. They then wrote a rough draft on paper.

On day 2 of this assignment, students did some self editing and revisions and then worked with a partner on editing and revising. Students typed their final drafts on their Chrome Books. For this writing assignment students had to create a 2 by 3 table with different font size being used in each column. Students got to experiment with different fonts, text color, and background color.

Finally students started presenting their JOY to the class using the Smart Board. Students presented their JOY and answered questions from their classmates. The presentation part of this lesson will continue into Monday so that all students have the opportunity to present.

Language
In language our focus was reviewing possessive nouns and contractions. Both of these types of words require an apostrophe and students have a tendency to confuse them and forget the apostrophe.

Projects
During the 2nd semester of the year our focus on projects will be in Science. Our official project will start next week but we have been using our project time to build a foundation of the Scientific Method and frontloading some information on matter. This work will continue into this week as well.

I hope everyone is getting back into their regular routines and had a relaxing weekend. As always, looking forward to another wonderful week in Room 5.

Here's the 2nd Grade Reading information from Mrs. Jackson.


Our first week back!

It was so fun to be back.  We had a great week with our friends and back in our classroom.  This week we will begin learning how to conduct non fiction research papers on animals.  Students will research what the animal looks like, what they eat, where they live and fun facts.  We will work on this first as a group and then do our own independent research on another animal.  

Also, we are working more at in depth reading comprehension.  Weekly, we are working on "Wonder Story" passages, answering multiple choice and written comprehension questions.  I hope that you noticed the change from 2's to 3's on your child's report card. Since we did not hold conferences this quarter, please feel free to text or email me any questions that you have about specifics.  

I continue to work daily with each child in a small reading group working at each group's level and with their specific needs.  Just a reminder:  even if I don't assign a specific book for reading, your child should still be reading 20 minutes daily in another book from home.  I can see so much growth and benefit from this work at home!  It truly makes a huge difference!

This week we will also be learning a bit about Martin Luther King Jr. in anticipation of next week's holiday and our 3-day week here at school.  

Our Word Family this week is the "ew" family.  

I hope you have had a relaxing weekend.  It's been nice for me to catch up after the holidays.  

Thank you!!! Kristen Jackson

Sunday, January 4, 2015

Welcome 2015!!


Happy New Year written in

Dear Parents,

Happy New Year!!  I hope you enjoyed your holiday season as much as I did.  It was great fun to spend time baking, shopping, and enjoying the company of family and friends.  My vacation was very relaxing and I feel so ready to come back to school.  I can hardly wait to see all the kiddos!!

I'd like to send out a huge thank you for all the wonderful Christmas gifts.  At the teacher breakfast on December 18th, I was presented with a Christmas stocking filled with all sorts of wonderful goodies including $100 in Spa Cards.  I was very overwhelmed with such a generous gift.  The teachers at Oasis traditionally enjoy a "Spa Day" at the end of the year, so I will be holding on to the cards until then.  Thank you so much!!

Before vacation in math, we finished up our unit on money and worked on end of the quarter assessments.  We will start 2015 with measurement.  The IXL site does not match the concepts we are working on this week, so homework will consist of worksheets this week.  Here is the homework schedule for this coming week.
Mon.-Worksheet
Tues.-Worksheet
Wed.-Practice Test B
Thurs.-Assessment Day (no homework)

Report cards will be going home this week.  Keep in mind that students are graded on a 1 to 3 scale with 3 being mastery.  Many standards will be worked on throughout the year.  We are looking for students to be making progress towards mastery.  If you have any questions about your child's report card, please contact me. 

As I look back on 2014, I can't believe the changes I've seen in the students.  With 2014 behind us, I'm excited to see the growth and development that the new year will bring!

Sincerely,
Anne Bloomfield

Here's some information from Mrs. Jackson...
Welcome back 2nd graders!


What a rejuvenating, relaxing break. I spent the first week making holiday rounds and the second week in Eureka, California visiting family, playing games, making crafts and spending time on the beaches. My favorite part of this vacation was showing my girls the giant redwoods that I spent my summers growing up in.  After all of this, I am excited, ready to be back and to begin focusing on new areas of literacy growth.


During the month of January we will be reviewing short and long vowels and learning more about prefixes and suffixes.  We will also be using non-fiction books to do research during Work on Writing in our Daily Five rotation.  


Our small group Guided Reading books this week will include examples of persuasive text, since we are still spending time learning how to differentiate author’s purpose (persuasive, informative or entertaining).


This week our Spelling Word Family will be the ank family.  Please remember that you can use Spelling City  to practice these words at home, since our weekly lists are posted there.  


Your child should be receiving their Progress Reports from the last quarter shortly.  Please contact me if you have any questions. It was exciting to see so many students meet standards that they were previously approaching.  Throughout this year, I will continue assessing any standards that still need to be met and working with small groups, so that each child can be as successful as possible at all required 2nd grade standards.


Let’s get back into the groove this week!


Sincerely,

Kristen Jackson