Choose Love

I'm excited to share that I will be piloting Choose Love Enrichment Program in our classroom.

This program teaches Social and Emotional Learning, Character Education traits, and

related Neuroscience. This program will play an important role in promoting student

academic and personal success.

Choose Love focuses on four important character values – Courage, Gratitude, Forgiveness and Compassion in Action 

• Courage: - Students will learn what it means to have courage in any situation. They will

develop confidence to help them face adversity and do the right thing, even when it is hard.

• Gratitude: - Students will learn what it means to be grateful for all of the good in their

lives. They will discover the many people and things they are grateful for and better

understand how to express gratitude. This will nurture a positive attitude and inspire them

to be kind.

• Forgiveness: - Students will understand what it means to forgive someone who has hurt

you. They will learn that forgiving does not mean you forget or accept the hurtful actions

as OK. But instead, students learn that forgiving will free them from bad feelings and help

them to have a positive mindset that will help them in school and in life.

• Compassion: - Students will understand that compassion is love in action. They will

understand what it means to have empathy and be sensitive to the feelings of others. And

then, they will move beyond that to realize the importance of being in service to others.

As we dive into each weekly lesson, your child will come home with optional activities that explain what your child has learned and extend the learning beyond the classroom. This is a wonderful

way for you to become involved in your child's learning. We hope you will share in this

experience with your children, ask questions about what they learned, and enjoy the benefits

from this program as well.

Check out the website 

https://www.jesselewischooselove.org/parents/

Starfish Gazette- January 25, 2019

Hello Starfish Families,

We had a wonderful week in the Starfish classroom.  We are especially excited to find out that our Wax Museum choices were finalized.  We can't wait to dive into our research using books and technology next week! 

The Starfish Wax Museum Presents:

Hailey as Florence Nightingale

Meadow as Jane Goodall

Cooper as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

Elora as Betsy Ross

Penelope as Abraham Lincoln

Vivien as Sally Ride

Lily as Sacajewea

Lucas as Neil Armstrong

Sawyer as Johnny Appleseed

Gavin as Squanto

Alexander as Alexander Graham Bell

Caitlyn as Rosie the Riviter

Parthvi as Harriet Tubman

Charlie Lord as Jackie Robinson

Cole as Henry Ford

Charle Smith as Babe Ruth

Addy as Ruby Bridges

Abby as Albert Einstein 

We are looking for volunteers to help with different stages of preparation for the Wax Museum:

1. Tracing Help: Looking for 2-3 parents who can help next Tuesday by tracing each child's body outline on our Wax Museum posters. The tracing can happen either in the morning or afternoon.  I will most likely have you work with a student one-on-one in the hallway.   Please email if you are interested!

2. Painting Help: Looking for 4-5 parents who can help next Friday with painting our Wax Museum posters. Painting will begin at 12:45-2:00. Please let me know if you are interested in helping!

Here is some learning activities that we accomplished this week:

• Launched our character reading unit this week.  The kids began analyzing characters in their stories and jotting notes about their characters in their reader's notebooks. We read a lot of great stories to introduce or reintroduce characters in series books to the Starfish.  When reading at home, be sure to pay careful attention to the characters. They do a great job describing their characters, identifying feelings,and why the character is having those feelings
• We had a special visitor from Shawn Middleton, a local storyteller! The kids enjoyed his humor, sound effects, actions, and character voices as he told his stories.  The Starfish wrote about his visit in their Circle Notebook this week! 
• Next week we are partnering with a kindergarten class to try out some of Shawn Middleton's storytelling techniques.  The Starfish will read a story using actions and character voices for the Kindergarten students to enjoy! We can't wait to choose our stories and practice all week! 
• We finished our unit on an introduction to multiplication and division.  The kids did such a great job with this new math concept.  Their teachers will be excited that they have a solid foundation and understanding of repeated addition, equal groupings and arrays to support their work with multiplication and division next year! Way to go, Starfish.  We are excited to start data collection, graphing, and measurement in the month of February! 
• Continued to enjoy our chapter read aloud, The Wild Robot.
• Working hard on our fiction stories.  Some kids are choosing to write realistic fiction stories while others are choosing to write fractured fairy tales.  It's exciting to see their characters develop and how they incorporate conflict resolution into their writing pieces
• Learned some calming strategies with Mrs. Dukeman during OT. Ask your child about 5 finger breathing, 3-4-5 Finger Rub, and Shake it out.  

Important Upcoming Dates:

-Friday, Feb. 15th:, 9:00-9:45 AM: 2nd Grade Wax Museum

** I will send home Valentine Information and a name list next week :)

Questions to support Home-School Connection:

1. Who is the main character in The Wild Robot?  Can you tell me a little bit about her?  What's happening in the story right now?

2. Can you draw an array for 6x4?

3. What is your fiction book your are writing about?  Can you tell me about your main characters in your story?

4.  What story did Shawn Middleton tell to your class on Wednesday?  What did you enjoy most about his storytelling?

5. What game did you play in P.E. this week?

6. What do you typically like to do during free choice? Who do you like to play with?

7. Can you tell me about the book that Mrs. Belanger came to read to your class? Did she bring Miss Peri with her?

Pebble Go

The kids are so excited to learn that there is a HUGE collection of biographies on Pebble Go. They explored Pebble Go during library today.  Ask your child who they enjoyed reading about. 


Pebble Go is an award winning resource for PreK-3 for data and research.  There is read-aloud audio available to support your child at home.  


On Friday, your child is bringing home information about The Wax Museum: People of Change.  Together this weekend, you and your child will come up with a list of your top three choices.  

Logging onto Pebble Go might be a great resource to check out this week to narrow down your decision.  There are so many people to study and be inspired by! 


Click on the link below:
https://www.pebblego.com/

Username: smswolf
Password: school

Arrays at Home

Hello Starfish Families,

As you have seen in my most recent blog post, our Starfish are learning the foundation of multiplication. We have been looking at arrays and applying the skills of arrays to learn about repeated addition and applying these to multiplication number sentences.




Ways to support your child's understanding of these concepts at home:

1. It is easy to find examples of arrays around the house. The most common examples are cartons of eggs, juice packs… any item that is packaged in rows and columns. Go on an array hunt around your home together! (example: muffin tins, shoe racks, ice cube trays, etc)
2. Another way to help your child develop some ‘number sense’ with multiplication is to have them create their own arrays.  Some ideas include using small items such as cereal, beads, candy pieces to build arrays at home. The kids could write the multiplication sentence and repeated addition number sentence that goes with the array.

3. IXL also has a great section under the Grade 2 Multiplication (Section Y) to practice early multiplication skills.  

Your child's log on information is: 

username: first initial last name 29 @ stratham (ex: mmurphy29@stratham)

password: sms

Please email if you have questions on how to access IXL at home!

Starfish Gazette- January 11, 2019

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

How nice it was to be back together as a class. It sounds like everyone had a great holiday vacation week. Although last week was a short week, everyone did a great job transitioning back into the demands of the classroom.

Here's an update of our learning in the Starfish Classroom:

Reading: 

At this point in the year, second graders are reading books that are longer.  The books the Starfish are reading are becoming longer and more complex.  We have started the New Year with some new work to do.  In many series books that your child is familiar reading at the end of 1st and beginning of second include Frog and Toad and Henry and Mudge.  In book series similar to these, chapters are episodic, comprising of self-contained mini-chapters.  Your child didn't necessarily have to keep as many characters, events, and places in mind throughout the whole story as they do now.

During our mini-lessons, I am teaching the kids strategies to keep track of these longer texts.  One of the strategies that we have been working towards over the last few weeks is learning the benefit of talking to others reading the same book.   We have been calling this Same Book Partners.  We had fun on our first few days back turning our library upside down finding all the "twin copies" of books in our library.  I was actually shocked with how many books I had multiple copies of.  We now have a section in our library called the "twin section" where all the books are banded together with multiple copies.  My hope is that the kids will see benefit to sharing conversations with others and will carry this work of reading a book with another person for the rest of the school year.  We are using sticky-notes  to plan conversations with the partners.  It also helps us to do a quick stop-and-jot to help keep track of the story.

Tip for home: You could do similar work with your child.  You could choose a chapter book where you each read the chapter book on your own and plan a few times to meet throughout the book to share deeper conversation.  The kids are typically really great at retelling the events of the story but we continue to support them to think deeper and answer what we call 'beyond the text' questions where the kids begin to infer and put pieces of the story together on their own. 

Setting Learning Resolutions for 2019:
We thought about being our best selves and had a lot of great discussions about our resolutions. Each Starfish was challenged to select one learning resolution they have for the new year, and a way in which they were going to work towards their goal. Check out some examples below and be sure to ask your child the learning resolution they made. 

 As many of the Starfish started their New Year with a toast, we also decided to make our own "New Year's Toasts". Thinking of others, each student needed to choose one person and one wish for them. 

 Math:

Our first few days back after vacation, we spent reviewing addition, subtraction, and money concepts through activities and games. We also took time to review comparing numbers and money amounts using the greater than, less than, and equal symbols. We were so proud to gather our word problems from the first half of the year and send them home on Friday. We are looking forward to taking on new challenges with our word problem solving in the New Year.

This week we will take our mid-year assessments and begin working our way through Unit #4: Foundations of Multiplication & Division.  We will learn about arrays, repeated addition, and spreading objects into equal groupings this week and next!

I hope you received the packet of some of our current favorite games that have been on our choice section of the menu over the last few weeks. In addition to games, practicing addition and subtraction facts within 20 for accuracy and fluency can be a helpful component at home as well.

  

Here's one of our Starfish practicing putting objects into equal groups.  Understanding the concept of equal groups is the foundation of division.  

On our first day learning about arrays and early concepts of multiplication the kids played an Array concentration game.  Arrays are a visual way to thinking about group of objects (multiplication)

Here is one of our friends fully focused and ready to take her mid-year I-Ready assessment.  The kids have some handy tools such as 100 charts and white boards to solve problems on the side.  Our work of solving daily word problems and extensive practice with addition and subtraction of two and three digit numbers has made them confident to answer many of the questions so far.  We are hoping to finish the assessment next week. 

Cause and Effect: 

This week we started a big overarching unit of "cause and effect" that will connect in all subject areas and cover competencies to expand understanding of this concept.

We spent Monday and Tuesday understanding the concepts of Cause and Effect.  

Here are some of the activities we accomplished:

• Brainstormed and illustrated possible Cause and Effects in our everyday life
• Worked in teams to create paper chains of possible effects to one cause.  For example: It is hot outside is the cause.  Possible effects could be: I need a glass of water, I need extra sunscreen, I put my sunglasses on, I was sweating, etc. 
• Watched video clips of natural causes and effects with the Grand Canyon, animals at Yellowstone Park, and fascinating phenomena around the globe!

People of Change and Influence:

As part of our Cause and Effect Unit, we have been learning that people are agents of change.  The Starfish are reading and listening to a collection of biographies to learn how people in history have influenced changes in our world.  So far, we have read about Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., Jackie Robinson, Amelia Earhart, Elizabeth Coleman, and George Washington.  During reader's workshop the kids are looking at collections of biographies and listening to biographies on the EPIC app on the classroom IPads. 

 Questions to promote "School Talk":

-What new Chapter Read Aloud is Mrs. Murphy reading to the class?
-Can you tell me about your new table spot?  What is your table's team name?
-Can you tell me how Same Book Partners Work?  Who is your partner?  What book are you having conversations about?
-What were the new games on your math menu over the last few weeks?  Can you tell me how to play aMAZING 100.  

-What is an array?  Can you show me what an array is?
-Who did you make a New Year's "toast" for?
-Can you give me an example of a Cause and Effect?


Thinking ahead to The Second Grade Wax Museum: People of Change

Our Second Grade Wax Museum will be held this year on Friday, February 15.  This will be a celebration of our "cause and effect" unit. This is a change from previous years, where students studied fairy tales. We will be studying some "world changers" through biographies and students will come to life as the person of their choice for the wax museum. There will be more information to come home next week about this exciting event!


Important Dates to Remember:

1. January 21st- No School- Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Day
2. February 1- Quarter 2 progress notes go home