Newsletter: Week One

Dear Families,

It’s been an eventful first week. In the past we’ve started school on a Thursday to allow everyone to gently ease back into the routines and schedules of the school year. It seems we’ve been thrown directly into the fire, so to say, this year. While there have been a number of yawns after lunch on the whole everyone has handled the transition wonderfully. After a bit of reconnecting and getting to know a new classroom we were able to jump right into some fun and interesting work.


Here’s a quick recap of some of the work we’ve done this week…


 We talked about reading habits at home. From these discussions the kids created questions, using these to create pictographs that would help us better understand our class as readers. The questions included:
How long would you like to read each night?
Did you read a chapter book or picture book last night?
Did you read a fiction or non-fiction book last night?
Where did you read (in your home) last night?
When did you read last night?

Each group offered choices from which to answer their question. The resulting pictographs (like a bar graph but using pictures rather than bars) were really quite interesting. We looked at these to answer questions about our class as readers.

 We read a great book called Roxaboxen. It tells the story of a group of children who turn a dry sandy field into their own sort of community with houses, businesses, and a jail. This served as an introduction into our study of communities. The kids have been working the past few days to create a visual representation of their own ideal community on paper. There were lots of water parks and trampolines, as you might imagine.

 We’ve spent time discussing ways in which we go about finding a book that we will enjoy reading. Responses included: Grace did a project on Cynthia Rylant last year and suggested this book, I love dogs and the dog on the cover looked like my dog at home, I like Fairy Tales and wanted to try a chapter book, This is from a series that I like, Other people told me this was funny, Mrs. Klosterman read this last year and I wanted to read it again, My brother read this and said it was really funny, and I never read this book!

We’ll concentrate a lot in the coming weeks on selecting books that are interesting and make us feel powerful as readers. As of right now there are a lot of readers in the room who are struggling to stick with a book long enough to see it through. This isn’t so uncommon for beginning second graders. They’ll all be engrossed soon enough. It’s a process.

 We learned two new math games. One is called Poison and the other is called Add’m Up and Cross’m Out. The kids will be coming home next week ready to play a game or two with you.

 We’ve started our writing workshop by simply working to put words on the paper. These first few weeks will be spent thinking about all the different types of writing we can produce each day. It’s very important that they learn of all their options as writers. It’s also very important to help them build stamina for writing. Once we get them writing a lot we’ll work on helping them build themselves into strong, passionate writers.

A lot of our time this week has been spent talking about expectations, as well. As are all new second grade classes, we’ve been quite loud, inattentive, and overly silly at times. Many of you have undoubtedly seen small notes coming home from your children telling you of their struggles. Please take these notes seriously but don’t overreact, either. Their purpose is to allow you to know of any issues in the classroom that we are working on. And we’re doing just that – working on them. By the end of our first month together we will be sailing quite smoothly. All our work to learn how to move about the classroom, listen attentively, and participate actively will allow us to get A LOT accomplished over the course of our two years together.

A Few Important Notes:

 We have an MAT, Ms. Brinson, working with us this semester. She certainly seems as though she is going to be a great addition to our group. She will introduce herself to you all in one of the next few newsletters.

 Homework for next week will be announced on Monday. I’ll post it to the blog (www.hassclass.blogspot.com) as well as e-mail it to you.

 My family is finally moving into our new house. However, we will be without internet access for the first few weeks. This will limit my communications just a bit. Be assured, though, the weekly newsletter and blog will be updated to help you know what is going on. And, as always, if you have any questions feel free to catch me after school or send me an e-mail.

Thanks,
Chris