Mrs. Shealy's Classroom Blog

Sunday, June 2, 2019

Newsletter: Sunday, June 2, 2019

Where Did the Time Go?

I can't believe we are facing our last four days in second grade. I know this past week was a little crazy since I was out for two days, but we still managed to accomplish great things. We started a new literature study of A Mouse Called Wolf. Ask your child about this sweet story and the inspiration for the title.

Our science investigations into motion have been very insightful and entertaining. The kids really seemed inspired in their independent home projects. The topics are original and the level of thoughtfulness in their planning was amazing. Thank you for all your help in these home projects. Each one has provided us with new knowledge as they are shared, and they have spurred questions about the scientific method that the kids had not really considered before.

We enjoyed a visit from Mr. Joe Smith, one of our awesome parents. He shared with the kids information about the states of matter and how he uses this information in his work to create super strong tools made from diamonds and other impressive materials. The kids really appreciated the hands-on action.

This week we will enjoy our last few days together in second grade and go over a mini-summer project which will help them share their summer reading with us when they return as third graders in the fall. (more information to come) We will also continue sharing our motion projects and our opinion writing pieces and speeches. Enjoy the photos below from this past week.

Important Dates

June 4 5th Grade Showcase of Projects
June 5 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare)
June 6 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare) Last Day of School
June 7 Teacher Workday
June 17-20 End of Year/Progress Reports Pick-up

Mr. Smith exploring chemistry and the states of matter with second grade.

The beginning of our motion project presentations:

Friday, May 24, 2019

Special Home Project

We've been exploring motion together in the classroom as we've developed experiments to answer questions such as "Does the size of a piece of paper change how quickly it falls?" and "Does an object roll the same distance on different surfaces?" Questions such as these have helped us learn the power of carefully planning out experiments in which only one variable is changed. These experiments have also allowed us to revisit key mathematical skills such as measurement and finding the median value.

Today the kids are coming home with instructions for a project they'll do at home that parallels the work we've been doing in the classroom. Each of them have identified a question they want to test at home with you. They've also started the process of listing all the materials they'll need and the procedures they think they'll need to follow to carry out their experiment. Your job is to look over this with them, make any necessary revisions, and supervise their experiment. The experiment itself (and subsequent data collection) shouldn't take much more than 30 minutes or so. Once they have their data collected they'll need to create a project board/poster to share with us. I'm setting aside time during the last couple of days for the kids to present their home experiments to the class. We've been creating similar boards/posters together in class so they'll have some experience with this already. Here's an example of one...

These are due Friday, May 31st. There will be no reading log or other homework this week so that you guys can focus on the project. I will send home sheets of posterboard if anyone needs one on Monday. Thanks for your help.

Sunday, May 19, 2019

Newsletter: Sunday, May 19, 2019

The Power of Persuasion

We have continued our study of persuasive writing. Most of the kids are finishing their final drafts of our first opinion piece. Many have begun thinking of a topic that they feel strongly about and that they could research to further develop their ideas. They will use their research to write a persuasive speech on this topic, and hopefully we will continue our work with these ideas next year in a project format.

As we have continued our study of magnets, the kids have paired up to design a magnetic invention. They worked together this week to discuss and sketch out their inventions based on all the information we have learned in this unit. Now they are beginning to plan and write a commercial to persuade customers to buy their inventions. To prepare for this, we watched several commercials together to identify strategies commercials use to win you over. Some of our favorite commericals were for OxyClean and the Chill Chest. Ask your child about these... you are sure to have a few laughs! This was a fun way to improve our writing skills.

We wrapped up book clubs and will begin a new author study this week. In math, we will revisit repeated addition and area models while continuing our work with multi-step word problems.

Don't forget this Friday is Splash Day. Check Center Connections for details.

Important Dates

May 21 SC PASS, grade 4 & 5
May 24 Splash Day @ 1:30
May 27 Memorial Day Holiday
May 31 5th Grade Graduation @ 9:00

June 4 5th Grade Showcase of Projects
June 5 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare)
June 6 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare) Last Day of School
June 7 Teacher Workday
June 17-20 End of Year/Progress Reports Pick-up

Here our friends are sharing their thoughts during book clubs.

Testing out possibiilities for our magnet inventions...

Fun with our friends at the CFI Dance...

Sunday, May 12, 2019

Newsletter: Sunday, May 12, 2019

What's New?

As you might have heard, we have tried a few new things this past week. Based on students' requests, we experimented with our recess routine. This week we broke our recess into 2 segments, a 10 minute break after lunch and a 20 minute recess on the playground later in the afternoon. The feedback has been unanimous... the kids love it. As the teacher, I can tell you they are now more productive and settled in our work time between lunch and our final recess. I'm so thankful for the kids' suggestion and the freedom to try this out. Two recesses will continue!

Also new to our routine is cursive writing. We began first with basic strokes and have now moved into letters. The kids are very excited about learning "grown up writing," as they call it. During one of our persuasive writing discussions, the argument for teaching cursive in schools was mentioned. Though it has been removed and added back into the curriculum repeatedly over time, one of the benefits of learning cursive is that it gives us a chance to go back and reinforce neatness and legibility. We are using a handwriting workbook for most of our learning and practice. In terms of sequence we are learning the letters that begin with the undercurve first: i, t, u, w, e, l, b, h, f, k, r, s, j, p.

This coming week we will continue with book clubs in reading and our opinion pieces in writing. Some kids have finished up their final drafts and are beginning to research questions for a short, persuasive speech they will give later this month. As mathematicians, we will continue to revisit and deepen our understanding and application of topics we addressed throughout the year.

Important Dates

Our new after-lunch break.

Here we are experimenting with transference of magnetism. How many paper clips can you get to stick together?

We have been focusing on naming the strategies we use each time we solve a subtraction problem. We have added a few since. Please share with your child any strategies you use in solving math problems.

A little team effort here: partners were working together to solve multi-step word problems.

Sunday, May 5, 2019

Newsletter: Sunday, May 5, 2019

Diving Deeper

It's hard to believe we only have five weeks left in second grade. Since I'm learning and living with the kids everyday, I don't always recognize how much they have grown and changed since we came together in August. Mr. O'Keefe visits with our kids weekly and has pointed out lately how much the kids have matured academically and socially. I'm excited to think about next year and how we can pick up right where we left off. Here's a little of what we've been up to recently:

Reading: On Friday we finished Skylark, and the kids were thrilled with the ending. We couldn't help but rejoice with these characters that we have come to love as they celebrated the end of the terrible drought and the excitement of new life. Patricia Maclachlan has provided us with wonderful lessons to improve our writing. As we pointed out examples of descriptive words and setting in Skylark, one of our girls shouted out, "I can just see it!" Those are wonderful words to hear as a teacher. We are moving forward this week with book clubs. On Monday the kids will explore their options and make their top choices for the books they want. On Tuesday we will set up schedules for their daily reading and jump right in. These books will be read at school unless there is a group that might need an extra day to finish. Our reading log this week will be choice books and standard format.

Writing: We began this week looking at an opinion piece written about lowering the voting age. The kids highlighted the opinion and reasons stated. We looked at the structure including introduction, development of reasons and details, and finally how the author left us with a powerful closing statement. As the kids worked on their opinion pieces we developed a planning structure to help them organize their thoughts (see in photos). Most of the kids are still working on their rough drafts now. One of the most challenging parts of this process for the class has been turning their list of ideas on the plan into sentences and paragraphs that make sense. I have modeled this with them as a group, but this will take time and many one on one conferences as we work through this piece. Two of our classmates were at the rally on Wednesday and realized, "those speeches were just persuasive writing!" We hope to finish up these pieces this week and begin working next week on persuasive speeches pertaining to something we are each passionate about. These speeches will likely require some research to complete so our current pieces are great preparation to scaffold us into the speeches.

Math: We have been extending our work in word problems to cover many of the math topics that we have learned about this year. Over the next five weeks we will be revisiting many topics we have covered but at a deeper level.

Science: This week we reflected on our experience and results from the insulator challenge last week. Then I gave them the chance to redesign their insulators based on this new information. I was quite surprised with how excited they were to make improvements and impressed with their ability to make data driven decisions to create these changes. We also took our questions from our last magnet investigation to explore them a little further this week.

Important Dates

May 14-16 SC READY, grades 3-5
May 21 SC PASS, grade 4 & 5
May 17 CFI Family Dance, 6:30—8:00
May 24 Splash Day @ 1:30
May 27 Memorial Day Holiday
May 31 5th Grade Graduation @ 9:00

June 4 5th Grade Showcase of Projects
June 5 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare)
June 6 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare) Last Day of School

We began writing this week by looking at an opinion piece about lowering the voting age. We outlined the opinion and the reasons presented by the author. This article also gave us the opportunity to examine a strong introduction and powerful closing statement.

As we began planning a our pieces, we developed this structure to organize our ideas. Then we were able to see the 5 sections which will become paragraphs in our pieces.

In math, we carried our work with word problems deeper by writing our own problems which we have begun exchanging them with each other to solve.

We continued our investigations into magnets this week. The kids have developed some thoughtful questions based on their experiences with magnets so far.

This wasn't part of my job description but Dr. Hass and I removed a little visitor from one of the trash cans out front. I think he was enjoying a snack in his dark, little hideout!

The warm weather has made life evident all around us right now.

A swallow building a nest on my porch.

Lydia with a friend at recess.

Sunday, April 28, 2019

Newsletter: Sunday, April 28, 2019

Catching Up

Prior to Spring Break, we had a few weeks of big items: expert projects, share fair, curriculum night, and gathering. The kids did a wonderful job presenting their learning in both the share fairs and gathering, but our curriculum night was an overwheming success. I received numerous requests form families to have more events like this in the future. It was a success because of your hard work and involvement. The kids could absolutely tell how much you valued their time and effort.

I have to say with these events behind us, it was comforting this week to get back into our routines.

Reading: We are currently in the midst of a literature study on Skylark, the sequel to Sarah Plain and Tall. The kids and I have grown to love these characters and you can feel the emotion in our classroom as we read each day together. We are using this book to not only to look at character development and interactions but also to examine setting and plot.

Writing: As writers we have launched our unit on opinion writing. We began by looking at examples in literature. The first text we read was Mo Willems, Don't Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late.

We analyzed this fun text to find the opinion stated and the reasons that were given to support this. Then the kids broke in to pairs to choose an idea from a list of second grade opinions they had created. Each pair had to devleop three reasons to support their opinion. As we began sharing these, the discussion advanced much quicker than I expected into counter arguments and making your reasons stronger. They really bought into this unit. I am so excited to see how their individual pieces will develop.

Math: Most recently we have studied the concepts of perimeter and area. We have also been looking at multi-step word problems and breaking them down to see what is important, what information may be unnecessary, and what the problem is asking. This helps us to develop our strategy for solving the problem.

Science: In our study of the states of matter, we have been investigating the characteristics of solids, liquids and gases. Through our experiments we have observed the transitions between states. During our Insulator Challenge, the kids researched and chose their materials and carefully planned the design for their insulators. We recorded the amount of ice left in each insulator at 1.5 hour intervals through out the day on Friday. At the end of the day everyone graphed their results. We will debrief tomorrow and compare results for each design to form our conclusions.

Important Dates

May 5 CFI Family Day @ the Fireflies
May 14-16 SC READY, grades 3-5
May 21 SC PASS, grade 4 & 5
May 17 CFI Family Dance, 6:30—8:00
May 24 Splash Day @ 1:30
May 27 Memorial Day Holiday
May 31 5th Grade Graduation @ 9:00

June 4 5th Grade Showcase of Projects
June 5 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare)
June 6 11:30 Dismissal (no AfterCare) Last Day of School

After 7 months of waiting this black swallowtail emerged from the chrysalis. We were very surprised to make this discovery during morning meeting one day but so thankful we hadn't given up on these. We still have a couple left so we will continue to wait patiently.

We continue to look at arrays like the one below. These figures lend themselves to repeated addition as demonstrated here and eventually to multiplication. This thought pattern also helps prepare us for the concepts of perimeter and area.

Here we are presenting the non-fiction books we made to teach classes about our countries during our school share fair.

What an amazing night we experienced during our Curriculum Night / Family Share Fair. The food was delicious and the company was even better. Thank you for being a part of this celebration.