Tuesday, September 4, 2012

Hello!

I hope you all had a nice, long weekend. I was able to spend time relaxing with my family.

This week's IA is Music. Next week is PE.

Reader's Workshop
This week, we will be learning about how making connections helps us understand our reading better. Today, we read, Bedhead, about a little boy who has a nasty case of bedhead on picture day. We talked about how he was feeling embarrassed, and times that we felt embarrassed. Then, we discussed how these connections helped us understand how he was feeling. We better understood why he acted like he did. While you're reading at home with your child, stop every now and then and ask them what the story reminds them of, and how thinking about that helps them understand the story.

Writer's Workshop
We are beginning our first Genre Study. We will do many of these this year. This week, we begin learning about Personal Narratives, or stories about our lives. These will be "small moment" or experience stories. We will immerse ourselves in published personal narratives to learn how other authors wrote their stories. These will be the mentor texts we model our writing after. Once we've drafted, revised, edited, and published our personal narratives, we'll invite parents in to share our stories with. I'm very excited to read some amazing stories!

Math
The beginning of the year in math is a lot of review from 1st grade. We're reviewing how to count money, tell time, and find patterns in numbers. Homework for math will begin next week.

Expedition
Before beginning our first expedition, we are finalizing our in-depth study of our character traits. We've finished learning about perseverance and stewardship. Here are some pictures of our character traits in action.

Though the zip line was the highlight of the Voyage, it took a lot of perseverance to get up the tower and let yourself step off and trust the equipment. The smiles show just how fun perseverance can be! I love that I can pull these experiences back into the classroom, so when students are feeling challenged by academics, I can remind them how they persevered at Camp Elim and I know they can do it here too. 

Each day, we have stewardship time, when we take care of our classroom and make sure it's ready for the next day. This includes making sure the library is organized and the floor is picked up. I've noticed that this has transfered to other parts of the day. Many students were recognized by their classmates today for picking up trash on the playground during recess!