Beginning Bloggers

This past week the second graders created poems about peace using our five senses as inspiration. We integrated technology into this writing project by typing up our poems using Microsoft Word. The students practiced their typing and formatting and reviewed how to save their documents into their personal folder. Then they created a picture that represented their poem using the Paint program and learned how to copy and paste a picture into a word document for a beautiful finished product. These are now hanging in the hallway outside of Synergy House. Lastly, they learned how to copy and paste their word document into their Kid Blog account so that others can read and comment on their work. The students would love for you to visit their blog page and comment on their writing piece. You can get to the Kid Blogs below underneath the wonderful websites. Then you can log on as user name: Family and password:family (lowercase). Then you can find your child's name under the Blog Directory on the right hand side of the page. You can leave them a comment underneath their writing piece.


In Reader's Workshop we are continuing to learn about story elements in fiction books. We have now learned about the main character, setting, problem and solution. During the student's independent reading time they are using the context clues that we have identified during the read aloud to find these elements in their own reading. At the end of Reader's Workshop the readers share out which of the elements they came across in their own books. The students have been able to take what they have been learning about story elements in Reader's Workshop and apply it to their writing pieces in Writer's Workshop as we have been writing creative story responses to the prompt, "If I lived in a snow globe..." which was inspired by the story The Snow Globe Family by Jane O'Connor. Each of the student's interpretations of this assignment have been unique, fun and so exciting to read. There is nothing better than hearing a student come in first thing in the morning and say, "Can I work on my writing!" It makes my teacher heart grow three sizes!!!

Wishing you all a peaceful holiday season.

Chores for Change

The students of Synergy are very excited to be a part of a house wide fundraising effort for Heifer International. To kick off this service learning project we read Beatrice's Goat, the true story of a young girl from Uganda, whose family benefitted from donations through Heifer International. Then we went onto the organization's webpage to see how much the different animals cost. This was all it took for the students to begin setting goals and strategizing how they would work to earn money for children like Beatrice. Look for a blue information sheet about this project in your child's Friday folder. For more information on Heifer International visit www.heifer.org

Winter has officially arrived, so please be sure that your child has appropriate clothing for recess. Students must have snow pants and boots if they want to go off of the blacktop at recess. If it is possible, you might want to keep a spare pair here at school in your child's locker. This is also the time of year that we see the lost and found begin to get inundated with gear. Please remember to mark your child's name inside their belongings to insure that they make it back home to you.

Celebrating Our Differences

We all returned from our Thanksgiving Break rested, relaxed and well fed! This week we began a new theme unit called A World Of Difference. During this theme unit we will be joining up with Ms. Roger's class to learn about how we can celebrate our differences individually and culturally to create a more peaceful world for us all to live in. We started by practicing listening to each other as we shared where are names came from. The students all had very interesting things to share and we learned a lot about each other from this brief exercise. The next day, we discussed how we all have different physical characteristics and had fun thinking about our unique fingerprints using a website from NOVA. I have included this site in the Wonderful Website section.

In Math we have started a new unit based around strategies for addition, subtraction and probability. We will be working on strategies for fact fluency and getting an introduction to fractions using probability in Number Corner and Work Places.

In Reader's Workshop we celebrated the end of our November unit of study by creating a puppet of the character that we chose to study throughout the unit. The students then created a list of the inside and outside character traits that described their character. In the month of December we will be learning about different story elements (setting, characters, problem, solution) and how they help us to comprehend our reading.

I can't believe that 2011 is coming to an end. Here's to a peaceful holiday season.