Learning About a Democracy

Today we learned about what a democratic government is and observed our right to cast a vote about our class ribbon design.  Students waited in line just like in a real life voting booth, cast their vote by paper ballot, and then celebrated the results.  We learned the concept of majority rules and students had a great time seeing what won.

Waiting in line to cast our votes

Making our selection

 

Book Character Dress Up Day

I love this picture!  All the kids were acting like the character from their books!  Thanks for participating.

Awesome Apostrophes!

We have been learning all about the jobs of the apostrophe.  Students have learned that we use an apostrophe to show that a noun owns something and that we use it with pronouns to make contractions.  They got a firsthand experience being a doctor in class.  After getting prepared for surgery, students took two words and created contractions.  They used their mighty surgical tools; scissors, band aids, and their brains to do this.

 

Fall Festival

This weekend is our Fall Festival from 4:00-7:00 on the 13th.  We will be having an informal open house that day as well from 3:30-4:00.  Please feel free to come by the classroom and look at your child's work.  Our class worked hard to create our class project this year.  I hope that you come by and put in a bid.

What is going on in ELA?

We have been hard at work with our second English Language Arts Unit: A Season of Chapters.  Our guiding question is how do the parts contribute to the whole?  In writing we started small and learned what makes a complete sentence.  From there we learned what are the three parts of a paragraph; topic sentence, the body, and the closing sentence.  Right now we are focusing on each of those parts and becoming experts in paragraph writing.  In reading we learned to look at a story and answer the 5Ws and How.  We learned that these questions help us to figure out 4 very important story elements; the setting, characters, problem, and the solution.  We also learned that fiction stories are written in a very organized way; the beginning, action in the middle, and the ending.  We also looked at nonfiction writing and text features that author's use to organize their writing.  Next week we are going to start looking more closely at poetry and some literary devices like rhythm, rhyme, simile, and metaphor.

Friday is our celebration for reaching our school goal of $12,000.00 dollars for our Walkathon.  The kids will be watching the movie Dolphin Tale.  Make sure to send in the PG movie permission slip.  They will also be celebrating by having a water day in activity.  They will get the opportunity to dunk some teachers and have a Popsicle reward.  I am so proud of our class for setting a $500 dollar goal and surpassing it.  We raised $750 as a class!!!!! Thank you so much for helping your child get their pledges in and supporting our school.

Early Release Day

Tomorrow is our first Early Release Day. Make sure your child knows how they are getting home or where they are going after school.

Mrs. K

In Full Swing

We have finally gotten things going in full swing this year.  After a very rushed and crazy two day move in, our classroom is finally starting to look like itself again.  Students have been working very hard to learn the routines and procedures of 2nd grade.  With the help of music and some furry quiet critters, they are really starting to get the hang of things.  We have been discussing what community means and setting up our classroom community. As part of this, students have been bringing in pictures of themselves to keep in OUR classroom the rest of the year.  We have also discussed what it means to be a Wildcat, how we can be Bucket Fillers this year, what qualities a good citizen in our classroom would have, and the rights and responsibilities of students in our rooms.  

In reading we have worked on Daily Five activities, reviewed metacognition, and practiced the workshop routines.  We are trying to become deeper thinkers this year by really being aware of our thinking while reading.  In writing we have been working on setting up our writer's workshop.  Students have used many activities to get ideas for writing and have been practicing extending these ideas by writing long.  Math has been really fun because we start with a crowd pleaser, measurement.  We have been investigating different tools that we use for measuring like the ruler, measuring tape, yard stick, and meter stick. Students have also been learning how to organize data using tally charts and line plots. Last, but not least, we have been learning the Phonics Dance. Ask your child to show you how to do it.

Mrs. K

PTA One-call Emails

The school and PTA are now using one-call emails to communicate info home to
families instead of the one-call phone calls. If you are not receiving one-call emails from the PTA, please let Centerfield know.

Six Traits of Writing

We have started looking at books like writer's and talking about The Six Traits of Writing. We have been focusing on Word Choice. We've discovered that words can be powerful and can form strong mental images in our reader's mind. It is really important that we use words correctly and sometimes we say things that when visualized seem silly. These are some posters that the kids created using either puns, homophones, or homonyms.

We had a wonderful time practicing and performing our Christmas Musical "A Fantasea Christmas". The students put in a lot of hard work practicing their songs, dances, and making their costumes. Thanks to all the parents who helped us. Below is a link to the musical on School Tube. The video was provided to us by The Welborn's, thank you very much. Please feel free to leave a comment for the students.

Mrs. K

http://bit.ly/ytBCBI