Mrs. Wood’s Classroom Blog

Opening: We did the Tuesday – Week 3 Daily Language Review. Normally we correct them together but today we did not so we could go to assembly.

Anti-Bullying Assembly: We had our anti-bullying assembly this morning. We usually have them on Tuesday mornings. They are a nice way to come together and talk about things as a whole school. Today we talked a lot about RESPECT. This is something our class really needs to work on because many of the students are not being respectful to each other during class time by talking and interrupting and that disrupts everyone’s learning.

Math: We reviewed some math addition facts with +19.

Physical Education – I was disappointed to hear that the students didn’t do well in PE today either. They are spending too much time talking and not enough time listening.

Writing: We began an organizer to work on writing a scene. We talked about what we need to include in our scene to make it a good piece of writing (details!!).

Silent Reading

Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We read the story Chinatown aloud together. We discussed some of the things happening in the story, then we listened to it on CD. I have found allowing the students to hear the stories twice really allows them to comprehend the text better. We filled in an organizer to test our comprehension after hearing the story on the CD.

Centers – Well we tried the centers today. Unfortunately the children did not do well with this at all despite modeling and teaching about it yesterday. So we put the materials away and will try it again next week. Its so important for the students to have the time to work on the skills presented in the centers but that won’t happen when they are not following directions or paying attention when the work is being explained. The whole idea of centers is for me to be able to work with a small group — and when I have 8 kids interrupt my group time, we don’t get anything done. So we’ll set it aside and try again next week.

Silent Reading

Recess/Class Meeting: We lost our recess this afternoon due to our misbehavior. It makes me very sad when I have to take this time away from them for their behavior. We had a class meeting and talked about the things we need to work on (making good choices, only worrying about ourselves, being respectful to our teachers, other adults in our school and each other, etc).

Surprise! We did something fun this afternoon to practice for our Night of Thanksgiving on Thursday. I don’t want to say what it is in case the students haven’t told you. It’s a fun activity you may get to see if you come to the NoT (please RSVP by tomorrow — its the last day to reserve a space!).

Homework: Addition review (+1-20), Vocabulary worksheet

Opening: We worked on Daily Language Review – Week 3 Monday.

Math: We did part of Lesson 4.7 which deals with measurement and using different attributes to classify information. We did only the measurement part. We measured our desks from top to floor, our chair from top to floor and the width of the door of our classroom. Then we measured our math journals. We’ll work more on this lesson tomorrow.

Interventions: We did an activity to review some double consonant letters. We decided which double consonants would make the most sense for each word we were trying to make and rewrote the word.

Writing: I introduced the students to their new writing notebooks today. I have to admit, having the ELMO technology is fabulous because I can simply write in my own notebook to model for the students and they can follow along. We practiced how to make a heading for our writing and did a short writing activity about using exact nouns (in other words using words like cashier or manager instead of “the man at the store”).

Silent Reading

Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading – We previewed the first story in Theme 3 which is called Around Town. The story we will read this week is called Chinatown. We looked at vocabulary words the students will need to know (many are big words the students have probably never heard of) and I read aloud a short story to them to help them practice the skill of making judgments.

Centers – We are starting our centers this week. This will allow the students some hands-on practice with concepts they need to master for 2nd grade and also provide some small group time for the students to spend with me. Today the children didn’t use the centers because I spent the time we have (only about 20-25 minutes daily) explaining each of the centers to them so they would be able to use them effectively tomorrow.

Phonics/Word Wall – We introduced our 5 word wall words for the week: gym, writing, favorite, black and pretty. We wrote the words using correct spelling and lettering and cheered the words (they LOVE to cheer!). We then reviewed some previous word wall words by chanting and clapping them.

Silent Reading

Recess

Read Aloud: I read aloud two short chapters from The Tale of Despereaux. 

Housekeeping: We took care of some odds and ends that needed to be caught up on. I like to call this “housekeeping” because our classroom is sort of our house for 6 hours a day!

Book Order Preview: I sent home two book orders today. One is a December order form and the other is a holiday order form. I gave the students time to preview the order in class so they could make selections to bring home for approval. Please make sure you send the orders back in by Monday, December 3. They need to be in by that time so they can be ordered and received at school before winter break begins. Please make checks and money orders payable to Scholastic Book Club. You can use one check even if you order from both forms.

Homework: Home Link 4.7

Opening: We completed the “Tuesday Week 2″ DOL. It starts to change some of the things it is asking for so the students really have to pay attention to the directions.

Math: We did some review material and completed math boxes 4.5 and 4.6 which we did not have time to finish during our regular math lessons.

Physical Education

Writing: We continued working on our cross-text. I went back over how to set up the information from each story we read and put that information into an organizer to help them write their response.

Silent Reading

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading – we finished the ITT test for Theme 2. There was an editing portion, two multiple choice questions asking the students to identify complete sentences and a written portion.

Working with Words – we reviewed our Word Wall words and did a Rounding up the Rhymes activity.

Restroom Break

Silent Reading

Recess

Teacher Read Aloud: We read another chapter from The Tale of Despereaux.

Finish Writing: I gave the students a little more time to finish their cross text organizers and write the piece by transferring the information from the organizer to a clean sheet of paper.

Homework: none

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving break and enjoy your holiday!

Opening: The students completed their DOL for today. They are already getting better! I love these because they really do focus on SO many aspects of language kids need to practice (spelling, punctuation, phonics, etc).

Math: We went over lesson 4.6 which talked about going shopping. We are getting into more abstract math here — the children need to be practicing estimating by rounding at home. It DOES get a little confusing. We talked about some ways that the children can figure out addition problems mentally. Many of the children seem to benefit from still being able to look at a number line or other graphic item to help them with their addition or subtraction.

Interventions: We skipped interventions today because the students were having a hard time on the math problems.

Writing: We began working on a cross-text writing today. We read The Brand New Kid by Katie Couric and  Thank You, Mr. Falker by Patricia Polacco. Our question was “Being Kind to everyone is important. Do you agree or disagree?” Students made a 4-square organizer to help them sort out information to answer this question. Tomorrow we will write the response.

Recess/Lunch

Literacy Block:
Guided Reading – For guided reading today, the students took the ITT test. I read the test to them, including the story selections, and they answered the questions. Some students are still struggling because they aren’t following along with the stories — comprehension will be key as the year goes on, especially when dealing with the ITT tests.

Working with Words – We did a Guess the Covered Word activity and clapped and chanted some of our word wall words.

Restroom Break

Silent Reading

Recess

Read Aloud: We are reading The Tale of Despereaux which is one of my favorite books. The kids seem to be enjoying it. We’ve been gathering on our new rug that Mr. Nassar purchased for us and the students get this time to relax and unwind a bit.

Social Studies: With it being a short week, I didn’t want to start a new social studies unit with the children so today we made Turkey Glyphs. A glyph is a pictoral story. Each student fills in their picture differently depending on what they like or how they answer a question. The turkey glyph we did had us color our turkey a certain way based on whether we liked light or dark meat, were going away for Thanksgiving or staying home, etc.

Homework: Home Link 4.6

Opening: Students completed their first week of Daily Language Review. It was a shorter activity asking them to pick the appropriate word to complete the sentence.

Math: We played a math game called Money Exchange. Each student gets 2 each of nickels, dimes and quarters and one $1 bill (all play money of course!). They roll a pair of dice and depending upon the number they land on, they give money to the bank. For example, if they roll a 2, they may have to pay 10 cents to the bank. This reinforces the concept of being able to make change and work with small money amounts. Students could also trade in their dollar bill for change if they were running low on coins.

Interventions: Some groups worked on a short reading activity. Two groups worked with me on language flash cards.

Writing: We did another lesson on parts of speech to help us make better sentences. Some students aren’t paying attention well in class and are putting their words in the wrong columns. Many students have caught on to the concept right away and are making really nice sentences.

Music

Lunch

Literacy Block
Guided Reading: We did a whole group activity looking at a non-fiction story. Our focus was to look at the verbs. We circled many verbs that we saw in the story. Verbs are, of course, the action that is taking place in the sentence. I ask the students “what is happening” in this story and that helps. They also discovered some sentences don’t have verbs in them.

Working with Words: We reviewed our word wall words and focused on reviewing consonant clusters: tr, sw, st, cl, xt, br and gl.

Silent Reading

Recess  Unfortunately our class spent recess with our heads down They were SO talkative all day long and were not being good 2nd grade listeners.

Meeting
We discussed our classroom rules again and how Mrs. Wood’s job is to make sure they are all smarter when they leave every day than they were when they came to school (the big idea being, that we learn something new every day). The students talked about how they KNOW that they need to be quiet and working during class. We agreed to work on our talkative ways next week.

AFC (Academic Free Choice)
Normally throughout the week the children have the opportunity to earn 6 minutes of Academic Free Choice each day for a total of up to 30 minutes on Friday. They really didn’t earn them this week because they’ve been very talkative and not following the classroom rules. However, since it WAS our first week together, I cut them a little break. They didn’t get “free time” but we watched two short educational videos.

Reminder – Next week we only have school on Monday and Tuesday. FROGG Folders will not be sent home on Tuesday!

Opening: Students are completing a Daily Language Review each morning. It is geared toward 2nd grade benchmarks and covers things like completing sentences (in this case putting a capital letter at the beginning and an ending mark at the end), phonics sounds, spelling words correctly and more. There are 5 questions on each one and they are great practice.

Math: We did lesson 4.5 today which talked about Estimating Costs. We did a sample in class and the homework is very similar (the in-class sample was with a school supply store, the homework is  with a grocery store). The students practice rounding up the cost of something to estimate whether or not they can buy more than one item with $1.00. We also practice greater than, less than and equal to problems today.

Interventions: Today we set up procedures for our interventions groups. These groups are designed to help children who need more reinforcement for reading. We have 5 groups in our class and we gave them frog names to go with our theme! We have the tadpoles, the lilypads, the cat tails, the frogs and the toads. Each group has 4 children with one group having 5. The children will work in their group four days per week on literacy activities. As things get settled in with our schedule, we will also have a paraprofessional in our room at that time to help with some of our groups.

Class Meeting: We had a class meeting during our normal computer lab time to reinforce for the children the expectations in our classroom. We have too much talking and socializing happening during learning time.

Lunch

Literacy Block: We practiced our word wall words and cheered several of our words. We reviewed the words that were added to our wall this week (I put up words I knew the children would be using frequently and then we will add 5 words per week through the end of the high frequency list). We did a making words activity where our secret word was November. Then we moved into our Guided Reading lesson. For now, we are working whole group. After Thanksgiving we will split into smaller groups and students will do rotations and centers during this time also. Today we looked at 5 short fables and discussed the characters, main event and moral of each fable.

Silent Reading

Recess

Read Aloud: We are reading The Tale of Despereaux which is about a tiny mouse who falls in love with a princess.

Writing: We practiced our writing with our parts of speech boards which help us make sure our sentences have verbs, nouns and interesting adjectives.

Homework: Home Link 4.5

We had an assembly this morning to begin our day. The students did a great job walking down the halls today. Only a few reminders about staying in line and remembering not to talk (its a LONG walk so I do understand its hard to stay quiet for that whole time).

We still have not started our “official” daily schedule (that’ll be brought into place tomorrow). There were a few things that still had to be worked out due to our new specials schedules. We spent some time today reviewing some math concepts students learned in their former classes and we will start with actual math lessons again tomorrow. We spent some time on some Daily Language Review activities that the students will start doing in the mornings as their morning work. We went over these together today to get the students used to the routine of how to do them.

We read a short non-fiction story about Firefighters and learned some big new vocabulary words from the story. Students continued working on their district writing prompt and we did a short survey to let the reading teachers know what areas the children need more instruction in to prepare for MEAP testing in 3rd grade.

We had Phys. Ed this morning as well.

An updated daily schedule has been posted on our website. You can find it by visiting our site and clicking “Daily Schedule”.

Today was a bit of a crazy first day in our classroom! I gathered the students from their prospective classrooms around 9:30 and they had to bring their materials down to our class (they discovered it is a very long walk!).

We spent most of our time today talking about rules and procedures, learning the new routines in our classroom and exploring. We had our pictures taken today and began our writing prompt on memories. We also did a Draw-Write-Now Activity in which I showed the students how to complete a drawing of a boat (the Mayflower) and write a short paragraph about it.

Over the next several days, we will begin picking back up with curriculum as the students adjust to our new room. Thank you for your support during this transition.

Today was my first day at Harrison. It was my time to set up the classroom to prepare for the students to begin with me on Monday. I had a lot of fun putting my room together today. I met all of the students (except two who were absent today) and am so excited to be their new teacher. We’re going to have a lot of fun together.

We’ll spend some time during our first few days talking about the rules and routines we will use in our classroom. We’ll talk about respecting each other and ourselves and other people’s things. Students will have the opportunity to explore their new classroom and we will do a fun “first day” project together. I can’t wait to spend my first day with you all.

Welcome families to our blog! This blog is sort of like a daily diary. It will tell you what your student has been doing in class each day. I do my best to update the blog daily as it not only serves as a reference for you, but also for me.

Each new entry will show up above the others so you never have to scroll to find the latest information. Entries are usually (but not always) updated by 7 p.m. each night. You can also leave comments for me on the blog if you are unsure of something or even just want to say hello!

Happy Reading!