Getting to the Finishing Touches

            

      
                                                                                                   May 11, 2015

Dear Parents, 

First I'd like to say a HUGE thank you for such a wonderful Teacher Appreciation Week!  The door (thanks Mrs. Goings) was well, "adorable"!!  The coffee cards and other assorted drinks are greatly appreciated and the flowers just lovely.  My favorite part of the week were absolutely the thoughtful pictures, cards, and sweet notes from the children.  Thanks for making the week so memorable!!

Math
We finished up our work in geometry this week.  Students worked on composing and decomposing shapes.  One of activities was working with tangrams.  A tangram is a square that is broken into seven pieces.  These pieces can be flipped or rotated (but not overlapping) to create pictures.  Some of these pictures can be quite challenging to make 

Even Mrs. Mackedon tried putting together a tangram picture.

 but the students enjoyed stepping up to the challenge.  This activity will be available for students to work on as part of their Daily 3 Math by Myself.

This week will be filled with review and end of the quarter assessments.  Since we are reaching the end of the year and will not be working on any new standards there will not be any homework.


Writing
By this time on Mother's Day this should not be a "spoiler" but our writing this past week was another opinion piece.  This time students wrote about why their Mom is the best.  I was very pleased with the reasons and examples students gave in their opinions.  This piece was taken to final copy and hopefully has been read as part of a Mother's Day card.
Projects

In projects we finished up learning about the six basic habitats (rainforest, arctic, desert, forest, ocean, and freshwater).  Students picked the habitat that they want to focus on this week.  Students will be becoming an "expert" on one habitat and be focusing on an animal and plant from their chosen habitat.  

 Part of our project time was spent being an audience for the 3rd grade projects on "Outrageous Weather".  The third graders did a great job presenting and the second graders were good attentive listeners and got to participate in some of the demonstrations.  It was very valuable for the students to see a polished end of the year third grade project.

In closing, I hope all the Moms had a wonderful, relaxing, love filled Mother's Day!  I certainly did!!

Sincerely,
Anne Bloomfield

Here's an update from Mrs. Jackson...

May 9, 2015

Thank you so much for all of your wonderful gifts!  Everywhere I look my house is filled with flowers and my  heart is filled with your children’s words of love and appreciation.

This week I will be conducting final 2nd grade Reading assessments on all of my students.  During the time that I spend assessing them, they will be working on writing and art activities related to books by the author Robert Munsch.  We will be focusing on Aaron’s Hair, Alligator Baby and Smelly Feet.  If we finish these activities, we will be reviewing our alphabetizing, synonyms, antonyms, word work, editing and other 2nd grade language skills.  

During class, we will also spend 20 minutes reading in order to finish the novels that we have begun in class during the past 2 weeks.  There will be no homework, but we will be finishing these texts this week during class.

Thank you!!!  Happy Mother’s Day to you all! May your weekend have been on free of cleaning and sibling conflicts.  

Have a wonderful end of the year! We have so many exciting school-wide events...it will prove to be 8 unparalleled, fun-filled days.