Week of September 14, 2020

Reminders:

Please send your child in daily with 

    - a full water bottle

    - wearing shoes for PE

    - an extra layer and a hat to go outside

    - rain jacket when needed

    - knowing if they are home or school snack/lunch

                           **At this point, school snack and lunch are free for all families!

    - an extra set of clothing in their backpack

    - their home school folder 

         - completed remote schedule work on Day One of in person learning

 

Seesaw - Please let us know if you need support connecting to your child's Seesaw journal. If you have any questions about this tool, please let us know.

What a fun week! We have continued to build community, getting to know one another as we explore the CCS expectations and our second grade mantra. In theme, students have started to practice mindfulness by being present and noticing how they feel before, during, and after a mindfulness activity.

On day one we read Peaceful Piggy Meditation by Kerry Lee MacLean

On day two we read Big Breath by William Meyer

Get Your Mind Ready with Mind Yeti

Finding Your Yeti Body

We also began word study by reviewing letters-keywords-and sounds, digraphs (two letters that make one sound) and how to use our fingers to tap out the sounds we heard in one syllable words. Ask your child to say, tap, then blend the word cat!

Here is the poster we use during word study to support the connection between letters and their sounds with the help of keywords.

We began our first math unit! This unit focuses on…

• practicing efficient math strategies

• adding and subtracting with twenty

• solving addition and subtraction story problems

• counting by 2s, 5s, and 10s to solve problems

• exploring even and odd numbers. 

 Please look in your child's home school folders for an overview of this unit. 

Students were introduced to chromebooks, mice, and Seesaw this week. We are working hard to become independent with these tools. We hope you enjoyed seeing your child's first Seesaw posts of the year. Please remember... posts represent your child's authentic work. Our community is growing strong and we are taking ownership of our classroom. We are taking care of ourselves, others, and this place!

 

Here are some snapshots of our post-lunch quiet time before our You Skills class with Miss Betsy!

At the end of the day, we share our rose, bud, and thorn for the day. The rose is the best part of the day, the bud is what we are looking forward to, and thorn is the part of the day that did not go the way we wanted it to. Technology was a rose for many of our students!

We are all the same...we are all different...we are all unique! Our second grade community is amazing!

See you next week!

Week of September 7, 2020

Reminders:

It was WONDERFUL to be with your children this week!! Thank you for supporting them to wear masks, wash their hands, and stay physically distant from others! Please know that we value the home school partnerships. If you have a question, comment, or celebration, please let us know!

Please send your child in with 

    - a full water bottle

    - wearing shoes for PE

    - an extra layer and a hat to go outside

    - rain jacket when needed

    - knowing if they are home or school snack/lunch

    - an extra set of clothing in their backpack

    - their home school folder 

For the first weeks of school, our focus is community building. We build community by learning about each other and creating routines/expectations for how we will work and learn together. This will continue to be a major focus in our first six weeks of school together. 

At CCS, we take care of ourselves, others, and this place. We talked about what this means and have already begun earning pennies! Ask your child how students earn pennies.

As a group, we began talking about our second grade mantra. This mantra is:

We are all the same. We are all different. We are all unique.

We will use this mantra as a lens to empower children to see similarities when there only appears differences, be comfortable with differences and be brave by embarking in courageous conversations, and to see what is unique and special in others. We started this work by finding ways we are similar with each other. We played freeze noodle tag. To get someone unfrozen, we had to find a way we were similar!

We also began thinking about how each of us brings something unique to our community and that together, we are even more amazing. We read the book, The Crayon Box That Talked by Shane DeRoulf. We then decorated our own crayons to represent our pack!

The last page...

Do you know what a glyph is? Ask your child! A glyph is a simple picture or figure whose parts represent information about a given subject. It is a method of presenting data in picture form. As part of our math community building, we created Beetle Glyphs. See if you can use the Beetle Glyph Legend to learn about our community!

Another component to our work this year will be learning about and practicing mindfulness. We began by exploring the question, 'What is mindfulness?' We learned that mindfulness is paying attention to things as they are right now with kindness and curiosity. It is noticing thoughts, feelings, and sensations as they happen. It is being kind to others and yourself.We also explored how mindfulness helps our learning.

We worked hard this week!