Week Ending Sept. 13



in room 15, we strive to be
FOCUSED AND RELAXED
Weekly Update for the Week Ending
Friday, September 13
                                                                                                                        
Dear Room 15 Families,
            
It was great seeing so many of you at Back to School Night on Thursday.  I realize it was a lot of being talked at and I appreciate your graciousness.

Below are a few of reminders/follow-ups from the evening.

•REVISION INQUIRY: We would really love to have you come in and share your experience.  More info here

•GAFE ACCOUNTS:  Please return completed permission slips or send me questions/concerns about this opportunity.  We do need 100% participation to move forward.

•READ & RELAX:  Students are invited to bring in a mug to use throughout the year.  We will practice Read and Relax without families this Friday. You are invited to join us on the last Friday in September.

•GARDEN VOLUNTEER:  Because we visit the garden in half-class groups, we could really one more volunteer, if possible.  Our garden time is (every other) Wednesday from 10:15 – 10:45.

•ART PARENT:  Our art would love some help in the art room.  This is sometimes half class and sometimes whole class and the year’s schedule will be shared with the volunteer(s) so that this does need to be an every-week commitment.  Our art time is Tuesday 10:15 – 11:00.

•MAGAZINE SUBSCRIPTIONS:  Thank you for checking in about specific magazine titles that second graders have enjoyed in the past.  We would love to have subscriptions sent directly to school.  Here are a few titles that have been popular: Chop Chop , Zoobooks , Make Magazine , Ranger Rick , Brain Space , Chick a Dee , &  Animal Tales .  Of course, there are so many great magazines that I don’t know about.  If you see something that your child likes, chances are that others in our class would enjoy it, too.

•REMIND TEXT GROUP:  Text this message: @73kcc to this number: 81010 to join so that you will receive (infrequent) texts from about class/school goings-on.

•CENTERS:  I am in the process of building the Sign Up Genius for help with centers.  I will send a separate email with a link to that when it is ready.  Centers will be on Wednesday and Friday 10:45 – 11:45.

Please visit our blog here:  http://focusedandrelaxed.blogspot.com
What We Did:
Reading
• We increased our reading stamina to 30 minutes!

•I continued with initial reading assessments.

•We discussed the importance of being able to talk about (or retell) the reading that you do.  In pairs, readers practiced telling each other about their reading.  Even if students can accurately read the words in a given book, if they are not able to really think and talk about what they’ve read, the book may very well too challenging at this point.
Writing
•We started sharing small moment stories during Writers’ Workshop.

•We generated lists of words that contain the short a sound (as in rat) and the short e sound (think elf).
Math
•We completed module one and are ready for our first end-of-module assessment task.

•We completed our first Math Review.
Science/Social Studies
•We created our first draft of our classroom norms.

•We started to learn about maps in the library.
Other stuff
•We created a list of important questions for us to answer.  We also coded these according to how we think we could best answer each one.

What’s Coming Up:

•Our first homework packet is coming home Friday.

•We will start answering our rat questions.

•We will complete our first “math test.”

•We will sort the words on our word lists.

•We will compare globes, maps, Google Earth and an atlas.

•We will have our first STUDENT ONLY Read & Relax this Friday (students should bring in a mug—we will have extras, though).


in room 15, we strive to be
FOCUSED AND RELAXED







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