The wonderful Round Rock firefighters presented their Rock Solid Safety performance in the cafeteria this morning. As usual it was hilarious and the children had a great time!
Thank you for helping your child with the first week of the new homework folder. I thought they did a nice job with their responses. Please remember they are expected to complete at least 3 but can do all five responses. Each response should be at least 2 sentences and these should be in "published form"-in other words all K-2 spelling and capital letter/punctuation mistakes should be corrected. I was very happy to see that most of them read at least 100 minutes last week and met their goal. I am handing out Pizza Hut coupons at the end of each month for a personal pan pizza to all students that meet their goal each week of the month. Hopefully it will be a little extra incentive to read. Plus, those reading minutes are so very important to help further your child's reading growth.
Homework for the week:
Reading 100 minutes
3-5 responses
spelling words
Map Quiz
Pictograph page
Here is a schedule of events for next week's red ribbon week:
Monday - “Wear Red Day” (wear red to kick off the week)
Tuesday - “Backwards Day” (turn your back on drugs by wearing clothes backwards)
Wednesday - “Crazy Sock Day” (‘sock it’ to drugs by wearing the craziest socks you can find)
Thursday - “Crazy Hair or Hat Day” (“keep your head in the game”-wear the craziest hairdo or hat you can find
Friday - “Take Pride Day” wear something that represents what you take pride in, ex. Team Jersey, Fern Bluff T-shirt
Looking forward to a great week! Have a wonderful weekend with your family!
Traci Pettit
Friday, October 16, 2009
What a great Field Day we had! Even though it started out rainy and cold, the kids still had a wonderful time and all partipated well in the activites. Thank you so much to all of the parents that came out to help and support us!
Homework trackers are finally coming home today. There is space each week in the tracker for the students to respond 5 different days. I am only requiring that they fill out 3 of those days- but if they wish to do more that is wonderful. This is just while they are getting used to the tracker. We will probaby eventually move to 4 times and then to all 5. They also have new spelling words for this week in their folders. It is a little bit different than last week so I wrote an explanation at the bottom of their list. The other 2 papers in their folders are a worksheet on adjectives and a math page on expanded notation.
I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Enjoy the cool weather!
Monday, October 12, 2009
So sorry I am updating so late this week- I spent Friday until late preparing for today's conferences, and so the website had to wait until today. Thank you so much to everyone that came today to discuss your child's learning and goals for the year. I really enjoyed getting to sit down with each of you independently. I am looking forward to seeing a lot of growth and learning this year!!!
Well, due to the rain on Friday, our parachute drop had to be rescheduled for tomorrow- but now there is a big chance of rain for tomorrow so we will see. I can't wait to see if our eggs land safely! 10 extra tickets go to any group that is successful! Next in Social Studies, we will move on to map skills. We will be discussing continents, oceans, map keys, cardinal directions, compass rose, and landforms over the next 2 weeks.
In reading and writing we are discussing Patricia Polacco's books and how she bases many of her books on her childhood and life experiences. We are then going to apply this to our own writing and start drafting a story based on something that has happened to us in our lifetime. We will also be discussing the different reading responses that are going to be in the homework tracker that will be coming home this Friday. The choices will be a connection, a short summary, a prediction, and a noticing. Examples of all of these responses will be in their tracker and we will have covered all of them before they come home on Friday. I had hoped to have them by this week, but we didn't receive them back from Print Shop until late Friday afternoon.
In math, we tested at the end of the week on Place Value and now will be moving on to graphing. We will start surveying and making picture graphs and pictographs, then move into bar graphs. This is a fun math unit.
Don't forget that Friday is Field Day. I am hoping that our grade level shirts come in this week so that we can wear them on Friday. They are also encouraged by the PE dept. to wear a Super Hero costume that day if they would like. Our field day is from 9:00-11:30. We then have an hour break that we will be back in the classroom before eating lunch at 12:35. This is also the hamburger Cook Out day for Fern Bluff, so we will plan to get our sack lunches and take them to the front porch of the school to eat at 12:35. You are welcome to join us there for lunch if you wish!
In the Homework folder this week:
* 105 reading minutes
* Greater than/Less than practice
* Popcorn reading passage
* Adjective paper bag activity
* 1st spelling list of the year- test will be Thursday, Oct. 15th
I spoke to many of you about spelling today at conferences. Their list this week consists of words missed on K-1 pretest, and/or words from their writing journals. Every few weeks we will stop and focus on a 2nd grade rule and the words on their list will be rule based. Tests will take place every Thursday and new lists will go home in the homework folder each Friday.
Sorry this is so lengthy this week! Have a wonderful week!
Friday, October 2, 2009
Can you believe it is October already? I feel like we just got started and it is the 6th week of school already! We are continuing to learn many new concepts daily and I love how enthusiastic this class is about learning! This week we began our mini research on the animal they chose and started our factual acrostic poem. We also continued our study of adjectives by choosing menu items from our favorite restaurants. We are now in the process of "jazzing up" those menu items with descriptive adjectives to make them sounds even more appealing! We went to the computer lab this week and enjoyed a math game on the coolmath4kids website. I will add this link to my website for those that want to enjoy it from home. It has a lot of great math games on it! Our focus for math this week is place value, comparing and ordering numbers and expanded notation. We will continue this into next week. In science we finished our unit on matter with one last fun experiment called "Flying Matter". We added Alka Seltzer to water and closed the lid on the container. The gas that builds up makes the lid shoot off into the air. It was a lot of fun! We are now moving on into force and motion. Next week we will be looking at what a parachute is and what its purpose is. We will then be studying gravity, air resistance, and terminal speed and applying it to making our own parachutes. The catch is our parachutes will be carrying raw eggs!!! We plan to launch them next Friday.
Homework for the week:
* 105 minutes
* Editing sentences
* Place Value
We hope to have our 2nd grade homework trackers in next week in time to start them next Friday. I also plan to start spelling lists next week- more info on that will be coming home in next week's homework folder.
A few announcements:
* I am still collecting $4.50 for the Scholastic News magazine we will be using this year. If you haven't sent it in yet, I would love to have that next week.
* Education Go Get it Week is next week. Please have your child wear their Fern Bluff shirts on Monday and their favorite college shirt or jersey on Friday. We will be talking about what college they would be interested in going to next week and making college pennants. It may help to talk about it this weekend so that they are ready to make it next week.
* PTA Health and Safety Fair is Monday, Oct 5th from 5-7 followed by a PTA meeting and a guest speaker about the flu.
* On Tuesday and Wednesday of next week we will administer the OLSAT test. This stands for Otis Lennon School Abilities Test. This is not a test they can study for-a good night's rest and a healthy breakfast would be the best preparation. The tests are sent off to be graded and results will be here around the end of November or first of December. These results will then be sent home to parents.
I think that is it for now- thank you to everyone who came to our Academic Night this week! I look forward to conferencing with all of you on October 12th.
Have a wonderful, safe and healthy weekend!
Friday, Sept. 25, 2009
What a fun, busy week we had! We discussed non fiction books this week and had a fun scavenger hunt lesson presented to us by Ms. Dalton on how to find non fiction in the library. We also read a story called Never Kiss an Alligator and compared and contrasted the two animals. We then read a poem called Alligator Pie and made a class book where we each wrote our own verse to it with our own food. We had Alligator Cake, Alligator Corn and even Alligator Root beer! It was a lot of fun. We will continue our non fiction study next week with a variety of animals- they chose their animals today. They will then be writing an acrostic poem with facts about their animal.
In Science we had a fun week of matter experiments. On Monday we studied how solids can turn to liquids and then back to solids by making jello. Each table got their own flavor and we all got to taste each flavor on Wednesday. Then on Thursday we learned that mixing baking soda and vinegar makes a chemical reaction and turns to carbon dioxide. We did this in a soda bottle and watched as the gas blew up a balloon! They loved it! The great thing is we are recording all of this in their science notebooks and they are really learning a lot! Next week we are going to do one last matter experiment before moving on to force and motion.
Homework for this week:
* 105 reading minutes
* Number patterns
* Before, After and Between
* A reading passage about Hurricanes
Please plan to join the 2nd grade team in the cafeteria on Tuesday night, Sept 29th from 6:30-7:30 for our Academic Night. We will be covering our curriculum for the year and I will have out my fall conference sign up sheet. Conference day is October 12th.
Also- Fall Picture day is Tuesday. Our time is 12:40 which is after both lunch and recess. If you would like to send a separate shirt for them to change into after lunch I would be happy to let them change.
Have a wonderful weekend- enjoy the sunshine!
Friday, Sept. 18, 2009
Whew- what a busy week!! We are really starting to get in the swing of things now and the kids are starting to understand the schedule, expectations, and procedures better. We have really been hitting parts of speech hard with nouns last week, verbs this week, and adjectives next week. We listened to a verb song and played action verb charades this week, which was a lot of fun. We will continue to review these as well as others as the year goes on. The students have a verb worksheet for homework this week to help them review. They also have place value practice and reading minutes. There are 2 other notes in the homework tracker this week- one about our 2nd grade Academic Night which is Tuesday, Sept. 29th from 6:30-7:30. The other note is about class t-shirts that we will be ordering. Our color is Burnt Orange- yea!!! Go longhorns! Hope there are no aggies in the class! Anyway- the t-shirt is $5.00 and if you could send that next week that would be great!
We had our first star student of the week today- thank you Nicholas for doing a great job sharing your poster. Our student for next week is Gaurav. I will send home notes in advance, but if you would like to see when your child's week is, I have posted a list on my website for the year.
Have a wonderful weekend!
Friday, Sept. 11, 2009
We had a great week and got a lot done for having a short week! In reading we learned our Top 5 Reading Strategies to use when we get to words that we do not know in our reading. There is a packet with these strategies in their homework folder for you to look at. I have also included a worksheet in their homework folder that goes with strategy #3- asking yourself "Does this make sense?" "Does that sound right?" They have to read a sentence and find the word that makes that sentence wrong and then choose the word that would fit correctly. We also talked a lot about nouns this week and played a fun game called "Noun Storm". There is a homework page about nouns this week for review. In writing we read
Arthur's Family Vacation and are writing postcards from a place that we visited over the summer. While doing this we are reviewing the rules of writing a personal letter. For math this week we covered fact families, odd and even numbers, problem solving and how to journal in math class. We wrote about what we like about math, and what we don't like about math and how we use math outside of the classroom. I think it is good to get them thinking and writing in all subject areas. Our fungus is slowly starting to grow- if only it grew this slow in my house! We observed changes in our bread today and will continue to do this next week. We also began talking about states of matter such as solids, liquids and gases. We will continue this next week and begin talking about changes in the states of matter. We have some fun labs coming up with this part of the unit!!!
A few announcements:
* I will be out on Monday. My mom has recently been diagnosed with breast cancer and is having surgery on Monday at Seton. Cindy Lawson will be our very capable sub for that day. If you need me for any reason I will be back on Tuesday.
* Book orders are due to me by Tuesday please! And if you haven't returned your yellow Highlights form you can still send it to me next week.
* Wed, Sept. 16th is an early release day. Students will be dismissed at 12:45 on that day.
* Our library day is Thursday this year, so please help your child remember to bring their books back on that day.
I am really enjoying your children every day! They make it easy to get up in the morning!
Have a wonderful, wet weekend!!!
Friday, Sept. 4, 2009