September 8-12

ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:

Please remember to fill out the papers that went home in the Russell School blue totes last week!  Totes will be going home every other Thursday so be on the lookout for those!

Please send back any information papers that you received at ice cream social or on the first day of school in the manila envelope that had your child's name on it.  Papers like bus schedule, helping hands, and student information would have been found in that envelope.

Today, you should have received a classroom information paper with answers to some of the questions you may find yourself having after the first few days of school.  Please make it a point to look over this paper as it holds a lot of important classroom information!

WE DO HAVE SEVERE ALLERGIES IN THE CLASSROOM!  Please do not send in any snacks that contain peanuts (including peanut butter snacks), tree nuts, nuts, or cheesy snacks (such as goldfish, doritos, cheetos, or smart food).  Healthy alternatives such as fruits, vegetables, or crackers are great for a snack!  I would be more than happy to send home a snack suggestion list if you would like one!

THIS WEEK IN...

Classroom Procedures:  We are very busy creating SOPs (standard operating procedures) for our regular classroom procedures.  Today, we created one that will help us get ready in the morning.  Throughout the week, we will also create them for our pack up time, getting ready for lunch, and hand washing.

***Ask your child about our morning song!

Safety:  We have been talking about fire drills.  Today, we practiced with just our class.  We practiced linely up quickly, exiting the building quickly and safely, and also waiting quietly in the fields while we wait for the next direction.  This week, we will also practice as a whole school.  Talk to your child about our fire drill procedure.

Whole Brain Teaching:  I am a big supporter of whole brain teaching and action based learning.  Throughout our day, you will find us activating all parts of our brains (ask your child to sing the parts of the brain song for you!) and getting our bodies moving.  We have been learning and participating in many different brain boosts that involve us singing, dancing, and having fun!  In order to facilitate learning, we have been learning different ways to get our whole brain activated.  Ask your child about mirrors, teach/ok!, and our smiley/frowney board!  All of these things and more play a very important part in our learning.  More information about this will be coming to you in the next few weeks.

New friends:  We have been having so much fun getting to meet new friends!  We are learning everyone's name and a little something about them.  Together, we have been playing games and doing fun projects.  For example, we were given partners to interview.  From that interview, we were able to create a page for our first classroom book, Second Grade Friends!

Classroom Culture:  We have been building a classroom culture mostly through the use of children's books.  Each book we have read and will read in these couple weeks has a very special lesson for us.  Here are some books that we read last week and will read this week as well.

This book is a great story about a young mouse named Wemberly.  She worries about everything, especially the first day of school!  We spent some time talking about some of the things we worry about and what we can do when we get those worrying butterflies!  Some of us said we think about it and then let it go.  Others said that talking about our worries with friends and family members help!

The other students at school think Chrysanthemum's name is just plain different.  They make comments about it and make Chrysanthemum feel sad.  Then, a music teacher helps other students realize that Chrysanthemum is a beautiful name, as is everyone else's!  We used this story to talk about a very important topic... kindness!  Before reading this story, we took a beautiful cutout of a heart and pretended that it belonged to Chrysanthemum.  Every time we heard something that might hurt her feelings, we wrinkled the heart a little bit.  At the end of the story, we tried to fix all of the wrinkles hoping to make it just as beautiful as before!  Unfortunately, the wrinkles remained.  In order to help make Chrysanthemum's heart feel better, we each signed a bandaid with our name making a promise to always keep the following poem in our thoughts.

Click on the cover of this book for a video!

This is simple but beautiful story about the importance of helping others!

Today we learned all about being bucket fillers!  This book has a great metaphor for happiness... a bucket!  When our bucket is full, we feel happy.  When our bucket is empty, we feel sad.  Today we learned about how we can fill our bucket and help to fill the buckets of others as well.  Here is a picture of the chart that we created.

The rest of the week, we will read books that teach us about the importance of being ourselves, to remember that it is ok to make mistakes, that everyone learns and grows at their own pace, and last but not least, the importance of teamwork and leadership!

Here are the books that we will be reading the rest of this week.

Introducing the Daily 5:  The daily 5 is a system for how students can practice to become better readers and writers.  The first part of the daily 5 is "Read to Self".  This is when students are reading independently.  We have learned the 3 ways to read a book.

We have also built an independence chart to tell us what teachers and students should be doing during read to self time.  We have been building our stamina slowly but surely!  We started with just three minutes and now we are up to 5 minutes.  We'll continue building our stamina until we get to about 25 minutes of uninterrupted work time, where students do not get tired or give up.  Here is our independence chart:

This week, we will also introduce "Work on Writing".  We will create heart maps to give us ideas to write about.   We will brainstorm where we can write around the room and also the different types of writing that we might want to do.  For example, we might want to write a story or a friendly letter.  Then, just like "Read to Self" we will create an independence chart.  This will tell us exactly what we need to do during "Work on Writing" time so that we can become better and more independent writers. We'll use this chart as we practice building up our writing stamina.  Again, we'll start with just three minutes and we will work our way up to 25 minutes.

Classroom Vision:  Perhaps one of the most important things we have been working on creating is our classroom vision.  Our vision is our hopes and dreams for the best year ever in second grade.  Our vision gives us a clear picture of what we want and what we are working towards.  Here is our Russell School Vision as an example:

We the students of Russell School,
Promise to be respectful
Happy, healthy, friendly too
Kind and caring help you
Working hard and focusing
Helps us learn important things!

Have your child sing it to you!

In order to create our classroom vision, each student has been adding their ideas to three different questions:  What makes a great school?  What makes a great teacher?  What makes a great student?  After we have gathered all of the ideas we have put them into categories.  This week, we will vote on the categories which I will then turn into a classroom vision that the team can vote on.   This is very exciting stuff!  Be sure to tune in soon for more information!

As always, if you have any questions, comments, or insights please let me know!  Have a wonderful week!