ANNOUNCEMENTS AND REMINDERS:
Tomorrow is an early release day! Please plan accordingly.
Tomorrow is also spirit day! Help your child find something green to wear to show their Russell School pride as a second grader!
Homework packets are due on Thursday! Please remind your child to put it in their backpack on Wednesday evening. Remember... no homework packet = no free choice Friday!
Last week, I sent home a green sheet of paper answering all of your questions about homework. I hope you found the information helpful!
This Friday, we will be going on a field trip to Memorial School. We will be seeing a live demonstration by Mexican artist Gerardo Ortega Lopez. If I have not received a permission slip from you yet, I will need it by TOMORROW in order for your child to go on the field trip. Please sign it and return it to school as soon as possible.
The weather in the morning is getting quite chilly! Please send your child to school with a sweatshirt or coat of some kind. Although the weather may warm up by the afternoon, our morning recess and lunch time recess have been on the colder side.
Conferences will begin next week. You should have received an orange confirmation paper with the date and time of your child’s conference. If you did not receive the paper or have misplaced it, please let me know. I would be happy to tell you when your conference has been scheduled. Parent and child should be present at this conference. If you are unable to come to your scheduled conference, please give me at least 48 hours notice so that I can try and reschedule you as best as I can.
Our monthly spelling test is coming right up! You can plan to have your child take the spelling test on Wednesday, October 29th. This will be a fill in the blank story test. Team Howard will listen to the story and correctly place the spelling word into the story. They must spell the word correctly. In order to be successful on this test, please help your child practice using the words in context! For example, when should they use “their” and when should they use “there.” Many words on this month’s spelling list can be tricky!
For student’s who have been practicing the challenge word list, they will be able to sign up for a buddy challenge spelling test. This test is optional.
THIS WEEK IN...
Phonics: We are working with the short and long /u/ sounds. Our focus words are: sun, bud, duck, bump, cup, cube, dude, fume, rule, and rude.
Spelling: We are focusing on unit 3 this week. Here are the words: will, each, about, how, and up. We will practice spelling these words correctly and also using them appropriately in a sentence.
Vocabulary: Our new words are: drowns, drifts, desert, gently, burst, and neighbor. We defined these words and built connections to them. Then, we searched for them in the story called “Plant Power!” by Bradley Roberts.
Comprehension: This week we will practice drawing conclusions. When you draw a conclusion, you are thinking about the story and what it is telling you. Good readers draw conclusions based on what they know, clues in the story, and picture clues. We’ll practice this skill while we read The Tiny Seed by Eric Carle.
Grammar: This week we will be working with nouns. Nouns are people, places, and things. We’ll read lots of sentences together and determine what is the noun.
Writing: Since we are going to visit a Mexican artist on Friday, we will begin writing friendly letters. Our friendly letters will be written to Gerardo Ortega Lopez expressing what we liked best about his demonstration and also thanking him for coming to Maine and teaches us more about his art and the Mexican culture.
Scholastic News: This week’s issue is titled “Nocturnal Animal Showdown”. We’ll learn about owls and mice, predators and prey! Then, we’ll use the information we learned while reading to decide who would win in different situations, the owl or the mouse.
Read Aloud: We began a great story called Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith. It is a story about a boy named Henry Green who loves chocolate and eats it as often as he can until... chocolate fever! He mysteriously breaks out in dark brown spots all over! This is such a fun story for this time of the year, when many of us can be caught eating lots of candy!
Math: We are continuing our focus on geometry and Team Howard is on fire! We have been working incredibly hard not only identifying shapes, but also drawing shapes based on attributes such as sides, angles, and faces! Ask your child to draw a 3D shape for you today! We have been loving the challenging world of shapes. Lessons this week will continue to focus on 2D shapes, however, we will begin to delve more into the world of 3D shapes. We’ll practice identifying them, drawing them, and counting the number of faces (the flat surfaces of the shape). As an added challenge, we’ll begin looking at edges and vertices!
Early Release Fun: Team Howard has earned yet another classroom reward! To reward the team for filling my heart, we will be spending the day tomorrow immersed in a world of bats and pumpkins! First, we’ll create a picture graph to find out whether the team thinks bats are cute or creepy. Then, we’ll read two different fictional stories about bats: Stellaluna and Bats at the Beach. We we are finished reading the story, we’ll display data about the class in a fun way... a glyph! A glyph is a type of picture graph. Each glyph will differ as the responses from individual students change. Here are the directions we will be using to create our glyph:
- Do you like to hang upside down?
Yes- tree branch
No- moon
- Which story was your favorite?
Stellaluna- Black Bat
Bats at the Beach- Brown Bat
- Are you afraid of bats?
Yes- red mouth
No- orange mouth
Then, we’ll watch a short video depicting the life cycle of a pumpkin using beautiful time lapse photography. While watching the video and learning about a pumpkin’s life cycle, we will be creating stained glass pumpkins to display in our windows.
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