November 1st

Welcome to November!

     I hope that everyone enjoyed the three day weekend!  I have to say that it was great to see all the parents that were able to make it for our conferences this past weekend and yesterday.  If you have not been able to conference with me please get with me as soon as you can so that we can either schedule an in person or email/phone conference.  This coming week has a lot going on (as always) so please be sure to read below carefully and feel free to email me with any questions that you may have.
     The first thing that you may notice is that your child's sticker chart is now directly related to if they write down their homework.  I still go over it in class for five minutes and encourage some students to write down everything during the morning work time so that everyone can write it down.  While this is a challenging task it will make your child more independent and help make their transition to 3rd grade that much easier.
     One item that your child will notice is the progress monitoring component of "Literacy Cafe."  We piloted it today and it went smashingly.  I feel that the students will be better able to manage their time now that they now they are being held accountable.  I am also excited to see how this will push the students toward academic success and help them to further develop their reading and writing skills.
     That being said...we are working hard on "Small Moment" stories again this week.  This time I am stressing adjectives as well as indenting and punctuation.  Each week I will push one grammatical skill hard and there forth hold the student accountable for using it.  The topic of each small moment story this week relates to one thing that they did on Monday (Halloween).  For instance, a student may write about one house they visited while trick-or-treating or even a conversation that they had with someone.  The main thing is to keep in mind that while a small moment story should be full of details, it should be limited to one action or event that took place within 15-20 minutes at most. 
     Adjectives will hopefully be easier for your student to remember because of us focusing on Poetry for the next two weeks.  We are reading a variety of poems and will begin exploring the concept of writing poems with various rhyming patterns.  It is important to remember that while we will be working on poems that rhyme it is also completely alright for your student to write poems that do not rhyme if that falls within the scope of the assignment.
     We are back to Social Studies (but don't forget to fill out your cloud graph each night) and will be discussing the election process and explore the roles that we have in improving our community.  Please be sure to share any way that you have impacted your community with your child not only so that they can appreciate you but also so that they can make text to world connections.  Please feel free to have your student use any articles about the elections in their current event assignments. 
     Although we are not studying Science for the next few weeks, please be sure to have your student work on their cloud graph each night and to continue reading about animals and their life cycles.  This week we do have one assignment where students will draw a diagram of an insect that they have discovered in the Amazon Rainforest (it should be imaginary).  We will carry this assignment a few more steps before we are done and I am excited to see your student connect concepts that we have discussed with real life scenarios.  Please continue to encourage your child to read Non-Fiction texts as that is the focus in literacy for 2nd quarter and Science is such a great segway into Non-Fiction reading.
     Finally, in Math we are digging deeper with our exploration of shapes.  We are exploring the attributes of squares, rectangles, and triangles as we use a variety of fun classroom supplies to explore.  You may have your child tell you about playing with straws and pipe-cleaners, dry erase-boards, and tangram pieces.  Rest assured that it's all academic (as well as fun)!

Things to Remember...

     1.  Literacy Night is Thursday from 5:30-7:30 (hurray!)
     2.  Picture Day is Friday!
     3.  PBIS Celebration Day is also Friday (no Math Tiles).
     4.  There is a PTA meeting on November 7th at 9:30am in the Media Center
     5.  This is the last week of 1st Quarter electives.

As always, please let me know if there are any concerns or issues that I can help with.  Have a terrific week and welcome to the 2nd Quarter of 2nd Grade.  I'm already getting a little sad that we only have three more quarter to go.

           Sincerely,

                                 G. Harvey