January 17th, 2012 | 
Author: We now have individual desks in our room! Today was the first day students moved from sitting at tables, to sitting at desks. This means that they now have a consistent seating assignment and a personal space with which to organize and store their belongings. Tomorrow I will be showing them some different strategies and tools they can utilize to help them organize the space inside their desk. I have told the kids that they are welcome to bring in anything they would like to help them arrange or organize their things…please just make sure everything brought in is labeled with their name or initials! Next week we will be learning how to organize academic work (ie. all the papers they need and receive) so will you please send a 3-ring binder, 3/4 in. or larger, by this Friday? We will start using them as their homework folder beginning next week, so it should come back to school every day.
Below is the note I sent home today with all of the information about our desks and binders.
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Tomorrow is Immigration Day – yay! The kids have chosen immigrant names and short bios. They will become this person and should dress and act like their immigrant. Because the 7-yr-old mind can sometimes be fleeting, I’ve posted the list of bios below, along with a class list of immigrant assignments. Keep an eye out for photos and video of tomorrow’s 5th Annual Immigration Day to be posted under the Social Studies section!
Welcome back to school, and to a new year! Our pajama day really got 2012 rolling in a good direction. Don’t forget that next Thursday, Jan. 12 is our (Fifth Annual) 2nd Grade Immigration Day! The kids will be visiting Ellis Island all morning and then sharing all that they discovered with their parents that night at 6pm. Our ship will be leaving promptly at 8:35am so don’t be late! And PLEASE, PLEASE DON’T RUIN THE SURPRISE and fun of it! Experiences like this turn out to be magical when you’re 7-years-old! 
See you then!
We wrapped up our Civil Rights unit with a bang! Or is that a whisper? Either way, the kids’ silent movies reenacting details of Civil Rights leaders went very well. Thank you all for coming and supporting us in our learning endeavors! Ms. Merry was kind enough to videotape each group performing, and those are listed on the Civil Rights page, under ‘Social Studies’. Hopefully, the kids have gained a new perspective and appreciation for the phrase we learned about during our study of the Constitution – “all people are created equal”. We, as Second Grade teachers, also wanted the kids to make an emotional connection with the curriculum, and understand how it feels to not be treated equally. Hopefully we were able to accomplish that, to some degree, for each child. Ask your student what they learned about Civil Rights!
We had such a fun time stretching our “visualizing muscles” today! Ever since we learned that good readers visualze the text to help them understand the plot, we’ve been making mental pictures about nearly everything. Today in Rotations, each small group listened to a different type of music, then put onto paper the images that came to their mind based on the “musical clues”. (When reading, we’re learning that visualizing has to come from specific clues, namely the text the author chooses to use). Here are photos of the kids “visualizing” the music!
Here is a current schedule of Conferences scheduled for this week. I’m excited to meet with each of you!
I am looking forward to meeting with each of you during Parent Teacher Conferences! Included below are the standards I’ve assessed so far if you are interested.
Due to the short week, there will not be any homework this week. But I did ask the kids to spend the extra time practicing math facts, as well as their current individual math and reading goals. If you wanted to work on anything else at home, we are learning expanded form in Math, topic sentences in Writing, Civil Rights in Social Studies and fluency in Reading.
And lastly, there won’t be a Parent Curriculum Night this month, since I’ll have the opportunity to meet with each of you individually. I hope you have a great extended weekend and I look forward to seeing you next week!
We had such a fun time celebrating Hallween yesterday! I know we saw many of you along the “parade route”. The class party put on by Kirsten Ney and several of the parents was also a hit! The kids got to decorate a cookie, make a pipe cleaner spider, bowl with a pumpkin, make a sucker ghost and try to bounce a ping-pong ball into containers for points. A good time was had by all! Here are some pictures of the kids “living it up”…
Parent Teacher Conferences are coming right up – can you believe it?? Here is a copy of the sign-up sheet that is posted outside of the CRA office. Stop by and sign up for a time, if you haven’t already. Can’t wait to meet with you!
RAOK…Random Acts of Kindness. It has become a bit of a theme in our classroom lately. Over the UEA break, I came across a website and story in which a woman turning 38 decided to celebrate her birthday by doing 38 random acts of kindness. Some of the acts were free, some were not, some were easy and others required more planning, but all were uplifting to others. The kids loved the ideas and decided they wanted to do some of the same things in their own lives. One of the RAOK the woman did was reading to kids in a Barnes and Noble, and her daughter jumped in and also found a little guy to read to. Suddenly, everyone in our class decided they had to find a little kid to read to the next time they went to a bookstore! It was so sweet… We decided that it would be great to use this idea to celebrate birthdays in our class. Every time someone has a birthday, each person in the class will do 8 random acts of kindness in honor of that person’s birthday. On Monday, we celebrated Gavin’s birthday and it was so touching to see all of the kids coming up to Gavin and telling him the kind things they had done for others in honor of him. These kids are so tender! Ask your child what random act of kindness they’ve done lately!