Happy Valentine's Day!

A few reminders for next week:
Monday, Feb. 20 - no school for President's Day
Tuesday, Feb. 21 - no school for Parent/Teacher Conferences (Conference letters went home a couple weeks ago)

Friday, Feb. 24 - Daddy/Daughter Dance (remember to turn in your "dancing shoes!")

We have been working on being more responsible in 2G. We have had many class meeting recently about recess and classroom behavior. We have spent much time discussing how to get along and compromise with friends, as well as using kind words and voices with each other. It has taken us a long time to get our green chips filled for Class Reward. Talking and not following directions has been an issue, as well. This results in turning cards, so please be sure to check and sign your child's homework sheet nightly.

Speaking of the homework sheet, the expectation is that your child reads 20 minutes every night and list one title they read. While reading material is sometimes sent home, your child should always have something new to read (not read the same thing every night). If you find that you don't have materials to read at home, please email and I will be sure some materials go home. Also, your child is to write down a title of a book they read each night. Your child should write it, taking ownership and responsibility for this task. Also, we've talked about your child putting his or her OWN name on their work. Again, this helps them take some responsibility and pride in the work they did. Please make this your expectation as well. There are consequences if your child does not do this part of their homework, such as missing Fun Friday or recess.

On a positive note, the majority of the class is moving right along through the subtraction facts (some are even working on multiplication tables)! Be sure to allow your child time to work with an adult on this most nights of the week. 5 minutes is all it should take to work with the subtraction cards! If your child hesitates for more than 3 seconds, tell them the fact and have them repeat the whole fact 3 times. Lay it in a separate pile to bring up again after the full rotation of cards. This should not take long, but it makes a HUGE difference.

Enjoy your Valentine's Day! I will make sure your child feels loved and cared for today at school!

Our Trip to Metea!

We enjoyed our first field trip last week, venturing to Metea Valley High School to see the bilingual author, Antonio Sacre. We spent some time reading his books and talking about learning different languages. We learned some Spanish, too! Do you remember what hermana, abuelo, or gato mean? Here are some pictures!

Super Math Sites

Some parents have been emailing me for ways to help their child prepare for the Accelerated Math test next month. All second graders take this test to determine the best placement for math in third grade. I have included links to great math websites in the margin of my blog for this purpose (Advanced Math Sites). Some have printable tests that you can sit with your child and work on together, some are online games you can have your child do independently and check their progress. The 2nd Grade Math Sites section also has great online sites for practice (although the kids have a sneaky way of finding the games that are more entertaining than educational!). I hope this helps those of you looking for additional practice at home.

We're going to have a WHALE of a time!

We are learning about WHALES!! I am learning things I never knew about whales this week. Tomorrow, the kids will work on something called a webquest. This is like a scavenger hunt using links on the web. They will look for specific information about the whale they are assigned to research! I think they will really enjoy this experience, since we'll be using the laptops and there will be a few parents to help out (so I am not running around like a crazy person!). The goal is to read for information, organize the information on a research sheet, and make a plan for how to share this information with the class.

Today was very exciting, for many reasons! First, we had a terrific assembly called The Wright Brothers. There were two men who told the story of how the Wright brothers came up with the idea for the airplane. They sang some great songs and were very good singers!! I thoroughly enjoyed it!! The kids came back and wrote paragraphs about what they learned. There were some really great facts used in our paragraphs.

Another exciting part of our day was the work we did with multiplication. We started talking about multiplication yesterday. For some, this is a beginning skill. For others, this is developing. The most important thing to focus on is that multiplication is not a scary new idea...it is just repeated addition. We have started this concept with understanding an array (rows with equal numbers of objects). Today's homework included thinking about multiple packages of things. One way you can help at home is to take the opportunity to turn everyday things at home into a multiplication problem. Do you have a box of granola bard at home? If there are 12 in that box, how many would be in two boxes? Did you buy a pack of gum? How many pieces are in one pack? How many would be in 3? Stress that to solve these problems, you would just add a number a certain number of times. We are working on the answer being called the product.

We continue to work on learning cursive handwriting. So far, we have worked on cursive i, t, u w, r, and s. Which one do you think would be the hardest to learn?

That is some of the news for today! Thanks again for all the donations of pencils and tissues!