Aggie Dive Team Visit

One morning we had the pleasure of hosting the Aggie Dive Team. These athletes are always in need of community volunteer hours and our second grade ELA team was happy to help them out! They came one more and read with the kids for about thirty minutes and then wrote with the kids for thirty minutes. The children had a great time receiving help and advice from a different perspective. At the end of our time together, the athletes were kind enough to give our kids some wise advice. They discussed the importance of doing homework, keeping up their grades, and setting goals for the future. The kids absolutely LOVED every minute! Thank you Aggie Divers! 

Main Idea + Contraction {n't}

Last week we got into two very big literacy skills. First, in Readers' Workshop we dove into a huge skill: Main Idea. I told the students that this will be something that they continue to get better at over the next few years. But to start, in 2nd grade our students are required to distinguish the difference between a top and a main idea. So that's what we worked on all week. Reading small paragraphs and together identifying the topic of the paragraph. To follow, we would state the main idea together. The kids were great at this!

For Word Work this week we focused completely on contractions with the "n't". The kids also seem to have so much fun with this skill. At the bottom of this post you will find their absolute favorite little video that we were singing alllllllll week long! This week we will dive into more complicated contractions for Word Study which you will see come home for homework again. One of the activities that they worked on last week was "Contraction Surgery", where the students had to perform surgery on the word not. They would cut out the letter o and then repair the words together with an apostrophe bandaid. It was a great hands-on experience to really understand what happens to these two words when we building contractions!

Lastly, here's a look at our newsletter for the week! Enjoy!

HAPPY NEW YEAR!

HELLO!

Happy New Year from Room 206!

I sure hope everyone had a fantastic break filled with lots of food, family, and relaxation! I wanted to do a post to catch y'all up on what was happening just before our break! 

We went into distinguishing the difference between a fact and an opinion. We mostly focused heavily on identifying a fact when we come across one in text during our independent reading. The students were very into this. They LOVE using the saying "well that's your opinion" now...hehehe! I just LOVE when they make the connections from our literacy lessons to real life. 

To practice this skill of identifying facts and distinguishing a fact from an opinion I went to the library for lots of good reading material for the kiddos. I checked a TON of appropriately leveled nonfiction stories. Typically if you see any "Rocket Reader" Scholastic books-those are perfect for first and second graders. The students read a different book each day throughout the week and had to jot dot at least three facts each time they read a book. They are also obsessed any time I let them use a sticky note. 

To hold them accountable, they had to stick their facts up on our Fact and Opinion chart at the front of the classroom and we later discussed and shared the facts we learned during our share time at the end of Readers' Workshop each day. 

Then we moved onto taking the facts that we read and forming an opinion about that topic. So the students had to be responsible for two sticky notes. One for jotting down true facts, and one for jotting down their opinion about the animal in their book. 

By the end of the week our chart was FULL of tons of great text written by the wonderful readers and writers in the classroom!

 We also jotted down our OPINIONS of these animals. We discussed how each of these are unique and different because an opinion is what someone thinks or feels and it CANNOT be proven.

 One last thing to share. Our last week before Winter Break was C-R-A-Z-Y. We had so many special days including our Grinch Day. Mr. Durand was sweet enough to take time out of his busy, busy day to come read this classic story to us. The kids were so into this read aloud-there was not a peep heard from this audience!

Finally, here's the newsletter as we look ahead to kicking of the first week of school in 2016! See y'all tomorrow!