What's Been Happening in D4?

I am so impressed with this group of students.  We have been working really hard on our Daily 5 stamina and they are doing so well!  I have, slowly, been pulling small groups (or individual students) to the front table while the rest of the class practices working independently.  This past Friday, we started practicing more Work on Writing centers.  We will continue this week.

Work on Writing:  poem

Work on Writing:  list

Work on Writing:  *surprise* writing activity

Work on Writing:  class journals

During our latest art lesson, we learned about Frank Lloyd Wright.  Here are some photos of the students during our art lesson with Mrs. Kimche:

If you plan on attending the Fall Festival this Friday, be on the lookout for a Frank Lloyd Wright-style stained glass piece at the silent auction made by Mr.Tullis!

We've been doing a lot of work with adjectives with the story The Best Place.  Kids worked together to find verbs and adjectives throughout the story.

We talked about what or who those adjectives describe in the story.

 

 

I love using the "shared pen" approach.

We also started talking about "shades of meaning."  These are words that all mean about the same thing but have some varying degree of meaning.  For example:  see, watch, stare, glance all mean to look at something but we can use different words to convey that meaning.  I like to use the term "juicy words" with the kiddos.

I gave groups 4 words that they had to sort from least "juicy" to most "juicy."

This display will be on our focus wall for a majority of the school year, for students to use during writing.

 We started talking about verbs and the different tenses (past, present, future).

Finally, the students wrote summaries about The Best Place.

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*The school password is moose.

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In the Past 2 Weeks...

Thank you to all the parents who were able to make it Back to School night last Thursday! Communication is so important and it was wonderful to talk with you all.  I also think it is important that you know what is going on in your child's classroom:

After reading How Full is Your Bucket? For Kids we made our own buckets and filled it with ways to fill our own buckets and those of others in our classroom and school. 

We have been working on our word study (spelling).  The students were given a spelling inventory and, from those results, I will assign them spelling words at their level.  This will start in 2 weeks.  We will work on word study (spelling) for 2 weeks before moving on to a new list.  One week is just not enough time to learn, practice, and use the pattern in their writing.  In the meantime, we have been working on the same list so the students can really understand our procedures for practicing word study in the classroom.

sorting the words by pattern

writing the words in their word work folder/notebook

draw and label

We have also been practicing our word work centers (which will be used to practice word study).

We talked about Growth Mindset and the difference between having a growth mindset and a fixed mindset.  These books will be coming home soon.

An annual tradition at McPolin--the flag raising ceremony--was held on Friday, September 2nd.

One of my favorite moments is when the entire school signs "God Bless America."  Awesome!

We had some visitors in our classroom.  The Living Planet Aquarium brought their rainforest van up to our school.  They brought along some animals that live in rainforests around the world and talked about how they adapt to their environment. 

crested gecko

white's tree frog

2 cockroaches:  hissing cockroach and cave cockroach

rainbow boa

blue-tongued skink

Finally, we started our 1st unit for language arts--all about houses and homes.  During this unit, we will be addressing many of our 2nd grade standards.

After reading this book, the students wrote about which home they would want to live in and why.

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