Wednesday, September 23, 2015

Beginning Memoir

We are beginning our first genre study and it will result in our first published memoirs. A memoir is a personal narrative about important memories. They are detailed and contain a lot of emotional meaning. Today, in class we read one of my favorite memoirs, Crow Call by Lois Lowry. It's about her going on a hunting trip with her dad who just returned from the war. I asked the students to come up with some observations from the book.

"It's very realistic."
"The pictures looked lifelike."
"I thought she was very enthusiastic."
"She chose words that were calm and peaceful."
"She had other people talking in the story."

These are all very important observations that will help guide us as we prepare memoirs of our own. The class came up with some memories and we categorized them. Obviously there could be other categories, but here you go:

-Vacations
-Visiting relatives
-Medical emergencies (broken arms, bumped heads)
-Birthdays
-Important firsts
-Beach trips
-Major accomplishments (Aquil said he hit a home run!)
-Overcoming fears
-Fun memories
-Tiny but important moments (Addison mentioned a time a girl stopped what she was doing to help her get a basketball that rolled in the street)
-Sad memories
-Time with parents
-Brothers or sisters being born
-Hero moments

After we made the list, the students went off and made a personal list of 3 memories. They are bringing it home tonight. Their homework is to talk through their list with you and work on narrowing it down to the BEST choice. The best choice would be the one that your child has the most details in their retelling. You can show them pictures of these events, or you could even say, "Remember when this happened?" so they come up with a brand new idea that they didn't think of today. The goal is that every student has picked a topic that will be a good choice for them as we begin this genre study. Monday, we will begin writing.

B

Friday, September 18, 2015

Pics of the New Foote Family

So, some observations from the day:

1. We could start our own pick-up basketball team.

2. These kids love music.

3. My pizza budget might need to increase substantially.

Seriously guys, I'm experiencing tremendous joy right now. I don't really understand how to explain it. But, I thought you would like to see a few pics from our afternoon.






Tuesday, September 15, 2015

Update

We have been busy using our awesome brains in the last two weeks. Along the way, we've done some pretty neat stuff that I wanted to share with you.

Economics and Communities

We broke up into groups and created communities with tax money. Some groups had rural communities, some suburban, and some urban. The rural communities had the least money and the urban community had the most, related to how many people could be taxed. Each group had a sheet with things they needed to build, such as police stations, fire departments, and schools. Each community had to have utilities such as power lines, sewage, and water treatment facilities. To keep track of their spending, the kids used calculators and a ledger.





After balancing their budgets, the students began building their communities by drawing on poster boards. They used the ledgers as a guide. They weren't allowed to build anything they hadn't paid for. Along the way, the students learned how difficult it is to plan communities and how communities with more people have more than those with less people.







Damien and Aubree named theirs "Labor City" where every day is Labor Day. Nice!


Here is a video that the kids have been begging me to put on the blog.



Math

We are still working with learning how to decompose numbers and combine them to add and subtract. This is the building block of regrouping, which is huge for 2nd grade. It helps the students see that when you're carrying, it's not just a 1, it's actually a 10. To help us practice, we played a math game called Race to 100, which is a very simple game you could play at home. All you need is 2 dice. Your child would love to teach you!



Writing

Next week, we will begin our Memoir or Personal Narrative study, but we wanted to get an initial published piece accomplished so we better understood the process that authors go through. These are choice pieces. Some kids chose to write nonfiction, others fiction. The important thing was moving through the process of making revisions and editing so an audience can better understand it. These pieces will be shorter than the personal narratives we will write beginning next week. I'm very excited about the Memoir study. One suggestion is to help your child come up with some ideas of important and meaningful memories that are just begging to be written.

Reading

We have been looking closely at reading responses such as summarizing and predicting. We also are practicing reading strategies such as chunking words, looking at spelling patterns, and skipping the word to read around it. As a chapter book read aloud, we have been reading Frindle by Andrew Clements. 

Explorations Pics



And this last pic is of Anna, Maiya, and me bringing back the colonial look.


Monday, September 14, 2015

Homework: Due Monday 9/21

Reading Log
Log 5 days, no summaries needed.

Math Packet
3 sheets. Two sheets are word problems; please make sure your child writes the equation or number sentence for each problem. The other sheet is mixed addition and subtraction.

Spelling List
Beginning this week, your child will have a weekly spelling list. They will see a few weeks on one sheet of paper, but they will only focus on 1 week at a time. If you feel they are ready to work on others, feel free. Since this is our 1st week, start with Week 1, not Week 5.

over
new
art
take
only
car
park
hard
barn
card
shark
dark
oh
eyes
timeline
hold

Tuesday, September 8, 2015

Homework (Blog Post to Come Later)

Homework: (Due Monday)
No math homework this week. Instead it's a reading log but only 4 days to log. Additionally, your child will do a short summary about the selection of text they read on 2 nights. It can come from the same book, just different parts of the story. This is to be written on notebook paper. The total of the 2 summaries shouldn't go beyond a full page (just one side). We're working on finding the most important information from the text to share. Have your child show you what they wrote and check for clarity of thought and ask them to probe their thinking more if you feel they need to add more important info.