Week of Sept. 9-13

Hello families,
It is hard to believe that we are almost half way through September. Time flies when you are having fun!

In reading this week we read the book Mercy Watson to the Rescue. This book is a short chapter book with a lovable pig as the main character. We read the book and each day practiced something different. We practiced cross checking a word with meaning, structure and visual information. We highlighted words and practiced breaking them apart whole group, then trying it on our own during reading workshop. Today we practiced fluent reading and pausing for punctuation.

In writing, we have been working on revisiting the strategies learned from first grade for writing workshop. We tried to act out parts of our story before writing. Using a mentor text called The Leaving Morning we tried using these craft techniques - a ellipse (or a dot, dot, dot), sound words, dialog, and repeating phrases.

In math, we worked on scrolling numbers to 1000 as a group. We took parts of the scroll and wrote them with partners. We started our first Open Response lesson, working with number grid puzzles. We will begin having home links in Unit 2. We played games to reinforce concepts about the number grid. We practiced counting coins, several students need more work on counting pennies, nickels and dimes.

In phonics, we were word detectives! We searched the book Those Darn Squirrels for long vowels - using word windows to find them and a partner.
We read poems and searched for both short and vowels and wrote them out on white boards.
The students have really started noticing words and point out vowel teams, silent e and blends when they are reading and writing!

In Social studies, we have continued to learned the features of a community. A homework assignment to learn our phone numbers and addresses is coming home today!

Upcoming events:
Sept. 17 - half day
Sept 18 - Bingo with dads
Sept. 27 - walking field trip (more details to come!)

Thank you!
Mrs. Scheck