Characters Come Alive!

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We began the week sending out sweet sentiments to our classmates on Valentine's Day. A big thanks to all who contributed a snack or other party supplies to help us celebrate the day. This week we also continued with our 100 Acts of Kindness challenge. Our goal was to fill out 100 hearts with random acts of kindness at home and school between the 100th day of school and Valentine's Day. We came close with 70 acts of kindness in just five days, so we decided to continue through this week to see if we can get to 100 before we head on winter break.

On Thursday we celebrated February's Synergy Spirit Day in style when we all dressed like our favorite book characters. The students blew us away with their thoughtfulness and creativity. We even drew crowds from around the school to check out characters like Junie B., Paul Bunyan, and Cat in the Hat. It was too bad that Ms. Rogers had to miss it. Her substitute, Ms. Viola Swamp was a real meanie! :) Check out this week's photo collage to see our class costumes and some slides of the Synergy Parade that we put on.

Our class filled up our warm buzzy jar this week and we celebrated our accomplishment with homemade smoothies! Now we are starting over and earning buzziest for being safe, kind, and responsible.

This week in math we continued with our study of Geometry and the kids were introduced to the idea of tessellation in the book A Cloak For A Dreamer. Then they got to work in their dyad partners to see if they could create a pattern that tessellated (or had no gaps). We will move into creating quilt squares using these concepts during the next few sessions in math.

We hope to see you on Tuesday morning at the Math Morning here at ABS. From 7:45-8:15 you can come and get a first hand look at our current Bridges Workplaces by participating in them with your young mathematician.

Lastly, in case you haven't noticed, it seems that we are in the middle of the longest mud season in Vermont history! This means that the playground and hill at ABS are very muddy. Please consider sending a change of clothes for your child to keep in his/her locker just in case the day's clothes get dirty while playing outside. It is hard to ask them to wear snow pants when it is 45 degrees outside!

Be Well!
Mrs. Eaton

100th Day and More!

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It was a busy buzzing week in our second grade classroom and you can see it all in the collage of photos above.

In Readers Workshop we talked about the three main elements of reading with fluency: volume, clarity, and expression. The readers then got a chance to practice reading fluency phrases with a reading partner. Their goal was to read chorally the first time through and then reread to each other making their voices sound like talking.

In Writers Workshop we are writing trouble stories. We began the unit by looking at examples of trouble stories like Knuffle Bunny and Fred Stays with Me. Then we headed off in partners to practice oral storytelling about our own trouble stories. Then we began to get our stories down on paper. Next week, we will practice turning these stories into fiction pieces by changing the characters names to tell the story in third person.

The highlight of the week was when we celebrated the 100th day of school on Wednesday. The students did an amazing job with their independent projects at home and you can see the variety and creativity in the slide show above. They were really thinking outside the box and exceeded my expectations! We celebrated the number 100 all day with math challenges, writing 100 words, spelling many words from the word 100, eating a gorp made up of 19 groups of 100, and writing about what life will be like in 100 years.

After reading the book Kindness Is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler, we have started our own kindness challenge in our classroom. We are hoping to collect 100 acts of kindness between the 100th day and Valentine's Day. The students can do these acts at home, in school, or in the community. When they have a kindness to report they write it on a kindness heart and we check in at morning meeting each day to calculate how many hearts we have earned as a team. So far we are almost half way there!

Book Buddies!

We started off the week by sharing our book recommendations and series books with the students in Mrs. Dyer's classroom. To see a slide show visit Mrs. Dyer's Blog. On Tuesday we had our first meeting with our new Kindergarten Book Buddies in Mrs. Canfield's class. We will be meeting with them to share books and writing pieces for the rest of the year! Click on the blue links to see slideshows from the time we spent with our Kindergarten friends.

In Reader's Workshop we began a new unit of study for the month of February. We will be learning about how to build stamina, fluency, and comprehension in longer books. This week we thought about strategies for tuning out distractions around us while we are reading and setting goals for how many pages we want to read. Doing these things helps us to read LONG and STRONG!

On Thursday all of ABS celebrated filling the Buzzy Jar by gathering together in the gym to do a whole school Hokey Pokey Dance. It was such a fun way to come together and celebrate our accomplishments as a school. We are also working on earning teamwork buzzies for our classroom by using cooperation and kindness with our friends, classmates, and teammates.