Stop and give yourself a pat on the back, round of applause, a deep breath...because you did it! We have made it to the end of second grade. This has been one of the toughest years to navigate as parents, students, and teachers. Even with all of the changes, me going on maternity leave, going from full distance learning to a hybrid model, you have stayed diligent in working with me to help your child succeed. Our students are resilient, strong, and adaptable and how they have responded gracefully to schooling through a pandemic has impressed me so much! I want to take this last week of school to celebrate the positive things your children have accomplished and celebrate students who have worked hard and never gave up no matter what, because that is what this year is all about. Since we have finished out Language Arts units, we have been using the last two weeks of school to complete our projects and focus on the arts. Last week, we did a study on Opera, provided by the Palm Springs Opera Guild, here in our local valley. The Palm Springs Opera Guild shares the magic of Opera with the students from our district annually but because of COVID, the education was provided virtually this year. Click here to learn more about the Palm Springs Opera Guild and the services they have to offer our students and our community: palmspringsoperaguild.org/education This last week of school, we will be focusing on a study provided by the McCallum Theater, titled Aesops Bops. Students will learn about David Gonzalez, a storyteller, and how he adds magic, singing, and music to bring his stories to life. Through these online series, the McCallum Theater wants all families, students, and teachers to experience high-quality dance, music, and theater. To learn more about the online education program, click here: www.mccallumtheatre.com/online-series In Math, we are finishing up Unit 8, which is all about measurement, data, and multi-digit computation. Students will focus on place value, three-digit computation, collecting and analyzing data, and conducting surveys. The unit provides a review of place value and three-digit computation, then focus on data collection and analysis. Students are introduced to a project in which we make cardboard ramps of different kinds to investigate some of the factors that cause marbles to roll farther and faster. After an initial exploration, we conduct formal experiments to test several different variables. In the process, we generate data by measuring marble roll distances multiple times, pool our data, and enter it on line plots to better see, understand, and analyze how manipulating the different variables affects the outcomes. The unit concludes with student-conducted surveys in which students generate questions on topics of their choosing, gather, organize, and analyze the data and share their findings with others. This unit lines up with our Science standards in design and engineering. The last day of school will be virtual for all students (Friday). Students will login at 8:40 and we will be on until the early afternoon. This will be when we are having our end-of-the-year luau, which is our party for students who have completed their work. The rest of the week (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday) will remain on their same respective schedules. Final report cards are being sent home this week! Final assignments will be graded on Tuesday, June 1st for inclusion into the report card, then they will be sent home on Thursday for all group B, in-person students. Group A in-person and Group C distance learners will have their report cards mailed home. Remember to send me your child's fun facts if you want them to be a part of the student quiz game on Kahoot, as well as contact information if you want your child to be on the summer contact information sheet. Also, ALL LIBRARY BOOKS NEED TO BE TURNED IN THIS WEEK! If you have any questions, don't hesitate to reach out to me through Class Dojo. Thanks for all you do!
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I am SO excited to be back in the classroom after being on maternity leave! It has been an amazing experience to see your child's face, whether in-person or on Zoom. If you have any questions about the new hybrid schedule or the weekly independent-work chart, don't hesitate to ask. I am here to help!
Since I have returned, we have already been busy working on a lot of new concepts and reviewing others. In Language Arts, we have finished Unit 5 and are now working on Unit 6 until the end of the year. The unit is titled, "How on Earth?" and the big idea is, "What keeps our world working?" Every week, children will complete a mini-project that is related to the essential question. Students will continue to practice writing weekly, with focus on organization, word choice, and ideas. This unit is focused mainly on the writing process of informative/explanatory writing, including pre-write/modeling, draft/revise, proofread/edit, publish/evaluate, and research. In writing, they will focus on effective expression in evidence, research, and opinions from Myths, with a focus on plant-life and growth in Science. The student outcomes are to ask and answer questions to demonstrate understanding of key details in text, recount stories and determine their message, and describe the structure or a story. Language Development includes adjectives and including commas in a series, as well as continuing vocabulary acquisition and foundational skills in phonics/word study and fluency. Week 1 - What do myths help us understand? Week 2 - How do we use energy? Week 3 - Why is teamwork important? Week 4 - How can we use money? Week 5 - Where can your imagination take you? In Math, we are currently working on Unit 7, which covers measurement, fractions, and multi-digit computation. This unit addresses metric measurement, fractions, and multi-digit addition and subtraction, set in the context of army ants, picnic ants, and imaginary ants who enjoy toys as much as second graders do. In module 1, students discover that the average length of a worker army ant is 1 centimeter, make army ants rulers, similar to the inchworm rulers they made in unit 4 and use their new rulers (or rulers at home) to measure in metric units. In module 2, an amusing children's book about ants serves as a springboard for investigating division and fractions. Modules 3 and 4 feature a new set of story problems that revolve around a toy store for ants. After next week, we will be moving onto Unit 8 to end the school year. More information about that unit to come on next month's blog post! We are ending our April Number Corner, which focused on fractions and data collection and will be moving on to our May Number Corner, which focuses on adding and subtracting 10 and 100 from any 3-digit number, using number grids and lines as models to support students' thinking. The calendar collector highlights measurement and data collection as students measure and compare heights of children in different grade levels. During the daily rectangle activities, students learn how to label rectangles with their dimensions, and begin to develop intuitions about the connection between the dimensions of rectangle and its area. Quick facts, a timed routine designed to help all the students master their addition facts to 20, continues this month. During the last week of May, there will be a final Number Corner Checkup to assess many of the skills and concepts that have been addressed over the past several months. Over the last 5 weeks of school, students will be working on their "My Body Project", as well as a second-grade memory book. The body project will be due on Friday, May 21st! Check back next month for another blog post. Until then, you can reach me through Class Dojo. :) Happy wishes to all, Mrs. Patel It is officially Fall and we are ready to fall into some outstanding learning opportunities!
We started our Animal Reports this week and we will be working on them for the entire month. This is a very important project because it connects to a lot of second grade standards, across content areas, in Writing, Reading, Social Studies, and Science. Later in the month when we complete unit 2 of our Language Arts units, we will be taking part in Science lessons having to do with bats and pumpkins. I am looking forward to this! In Math, we are finishing unit 2 this week. As a reminder, unit 2 was all about moving students through counting and grouping discrete objects by place value, to measuring length with trains of Unifix cubes, to measuring using the number line and open number line concepts, and beginning to add double-digit numbers on these number lines. Jack and the Beanstalk, with a few twists and turns, served as a springboard for this mathematical journey. We will be moving on to unit 3 on Monday! This unit will focus on strategies for multi-digit addition and subtraction within the range of 0 to 100. The first module emphasizes the number line model and encourages students to develop the strategy of using "skip-jumps" based on multiples of 5 and 10. The second module continue to use the number line as a computational tool through which students add and subtract two-digit numbers. The third module focuses on addition and subtraction, but uses the base ten structure (collecting ones and tens). Finally, the fourth module requires students to determine the frequency with which various colored objects appear in a bag and to graph the data. We have already hit the ground running with unit 2 in ELA, which is all about Animal Discoveries, we are currently on week 2 and will be starting week 3 on Monday! Each part of the daily lessons have focus on building background, oral vocabulary, word work, vocabulary, comprehension, and fluency. Other extensions of these activities may include reader's theater, reading digitally, and research and inquiry (which is what we are focusing on with our Animal Reports). In writing, there is an emphasis in narrative, informative, and opinion text. In grammar, we may emphasize nouns, commas in a series, singular and plural nouns, capital letters, abbreviations, and apostrophes. The big idea is how animals play a part in the world around us. We will be working on unit 2 for the majority of October. Check back at the beginning of November for a new update! <3 Mrs. Patel With an awesome start in August, we are now in the flow of things and students have been working hard! This picture is of their expository writing essays. I wanted to display them in my classroom to show everyone who walks in what an amazing job students are doing!
In ELA, we started the first week and a half of school learning our language routines, providing an introduction to the key instructional routines and procedures that we will use throughout the year, reviewing foundational skills taught in first grade (phonemic awareness, phonics, and high-frequency words), and modeling key instructional routines and procedures for collaborative conversations, close reading of text, citing text evidence, and the writing process. It also helped me to determine instructional and grouping needs for the students. We are now working in a unit called Friends and Family. In the unit, the weeks cover the topics how friends help each other, how families around the world are the same and different, how a pet can be an important friend, how we care for animals, and what happens when families work together. Within each of those weeks, we cover oral vocabulary, word work, vocabulary, comprehension, fluency, writing, and grammar. We just completed week 2. Next week, we will start on week 3, which covers asking and answering questions, determining character, setting, and events, writing narrative text, letter punctuation, intonation in fluency, and our story genre in Fiction. In writing, we just completed our expository essays. Now, we will be focusing on writing friendly letters through modeling, prewriting, drafting, revising, proofreading/editing, then publishing/submitting and evaluating. In math, our unit is called Figuring the Facts. This unit works toward the establishment of classroom norms around mathematical inquiry and discourse. The mathematical focus rests on the development of number sense, operations, and fact fluency to 20. Important mathematical models including the number rack, and the number line are introduced during the unit, and students are expected to become proficient at using strategies that emerge from these models. Next week, we will start “module 4”, which is our last week in this unit. We will cover fluency with addition facts to twenty. Each day next week will focus exclusively on developing fluency with addition facts to 20 and students will use this skill in story problem contexts. The number rack, bead string, and the number line are used to support the development of strategies, helpful for recalling the number facts. The following categories of addition facts are emphasized in this module: Add Zero, Count On, Add Tens, Add Nine, Make Ten, Doubles, Doubles Plus or Minus One, and Leftovers. This week, all students at Katherine Finchy were asked to take both math and Literacy benchmark tests in Imagine. If your child has not completed one or both tests, please continue to work on them daily. Check the document in Class Story to see if your child has completed one or the other. I was also able to conduct fluency testing and small groups have hit the ground running. I cannot wait to see how much the students grow over the next couple of months! Check back at the end of September for an update on what your child is learning then in our virtual classroom. New blog posts will be created at the end of each month, summarizing and sharing what we have been doing in class. Check back then for posts from this current school year!
Here is all you need to know about our Distance Learning Roll-out, as it relates to students at Katherine Finchy Elementary School and more specifically, students in my class.
Distance Learning Packets will be passed out the week of April 27-May 1. If you have not already picked up your child's packet, please stop by the school at your convenience. They are labeled in bins, by grade level and are sitting in front of the school, on the benches, to the left of the marquee. These packets are only for students who are currently enrolled at our school! Beginning Monday, May 4th, I will sent out the first week of lessons that go along with the packets. I will be pushing out the lessons in Class Dojo, as well as in Clever. In the packets, both ELA and Math are labeled by weeks and days, so follow along appropriately. Photo copies of the slides are included but the full slide presentation with working links will be sent to you each week by me. Each day, students can submit one picture for each subject (two pictures per day) to get positive points on Class Dojo toward our class competition. Since there are multiple lesson activities, students can pick their favorite one to turn in that day. Students who submit 5 pictures for math for the week and 5 pictures for ELA for the week (5 days M-F) will get 5 extra points for each subject for completing the full lesson. Students can get extra points if they want to send pictures of other completed activities too. Altogether, there will be 5 weeks worth of lessons, until the last week of school. See the calendar/upcoming events section for more detailed dates for the rest of the school year. Remember to reach out to me through Dojo with any questions you may have along the way. We can do this together! Welcome to 2020! We have had a lot of exciting events happen already, including our Ultra Bubble Fun Run to raise money for our school.
In math, we have completed our Measurement unit covering inches and feet; inches, feet, and yards; proportion and fractions; and thinking in threes. We are currently working in Unit 5, which covers place value to one thousand. We have investigated counting to 1,000; place value with money; multiples of ten, one hundred, and one thousand; and sequences and patterns. Next week, we will be starting Unit 6, which gets into Geometry. In ELA, our previous unit was titled Live and Learn (The Earth's Forces, Look at the Sky, Ways People Help, Weather Alert!, and Express Yourself). The genre of writing we focused on was opinion and we extended complex text by looking at both fictional and informational text. We practiced with different types of verbs. We are currently working on our unit titled Our Life, Our World (Different Places, Earth Changes, Our Culture Makes Us Special, Folktales About Nature, and Poems About Nature), with a writing focus on fictional narratives and poems. In grammar, we are still focusing on verbs, as well as contractions. We have been working on our Science project on magnetism since November. Our class worked hard and received a first place ribbon for our class project! Way to go! Here are links to books we have read in class that deal with how students are expected to listen in class. We have read these books and discuss them every day. What is Whole Body Listening? https://www.socialthinking.com/Products/whole-body-listening-larry-at-school-2nd-edition https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M383eW3ZRw My Mouth Is A Volcano https://www.amazon.com/My-Mouth-Volcano-Julia-Cook/dp/1931636850 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TqLvnGr2JtA The holidays are upon us but it is still important for all students to follow directions, be safe, and be responsible! We have been watching a video series on respect and the important of using it with others. I have posted these videos for you on Class Dojo, so you can be a part of the discussion with your child.
We have started our Science project for the Science Fair in January! We will be working with magnets to discover which "Christmas items" stick to the magnet and why. We have already begun our questions and research of our sources. Over the next few weeks, we will be looking at our hypothesis, materials, taking part in the experiment and data collection, then analyzing that data and reflecting on it. Each student is completing an in-class Science journal and we will be creating a class presentation board to turn in as well. In ELA, our new unit is titled "Live and Learn". We have investigated the Earth's forces, what is up in the sky, and ways people help. This week, we will investigate the weather and how to express yourself. The genre is opinion writing and we are looking at both fiction and informational text. In fluency we will focus on intonation, expression, phrasing, and pronunciation. In grammar, we will focus on the use of verbs. In comprehension, we are reading to find the author's purpose. In Math, we have begun Unit 4, on Measurement! We have already started using inches and feet and will begin adding yards this week. We will also look at proportion and fractions, as well as how to think in threes. When we return from winter break, we will be working on place value to 1,000. For the past couple of months, we have been taking part in a class reading challenge! Students who read and pass the test for 20 books or more with an 80% passing rate by December 13th, will be rewarded with a reading challenge party on Thursday, December 19th! These students have worked really hard and I can't wait to see how many students we have join the fun. There are still two more weeks to read and take tests on books. Keep up the good work! <3 Mrs. Patel It has been an eventful first two months of school! We have been learning, reviewing, and going over daily our school and classroom rules. Our school and classroom rules include being safe, respectful, and responsible at all times. We can do our best listening in class by whole body listening. Which means listening with our eyes, ears, mouth, hands, feet, body, brain, and heart. You can see the read aloud and what we expect here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0M383eW3ZRw&t=3s. We have also learned to be problem solvers when we are upset. Problem solving means: think about it, choose a plan, carry out your plan, and check your answer. Students should eventually independently manage their own feelings by being problem solvers and choosing a plan: calm down kit, tattle monster, reflection center, feelings poster, and peace corner are options within the classroom. They have also been taught deep breathing. We also had a Boo 2 Bullying assembly and have been talking a lot about being kind to one another. I have supported this through the Empathy video series provided by Class Dojo and we discuss this daily.
We have hit the ground running with ELD and guided reading intervention. For ELD, the intensive students stay in my room for reading and decoding practice, while the EO/benchmark students are split up between the other second grade teachers. All of the EL students are with Mrs. Byers at this time. Guided reading intervention is done within our own classroom and students are grouped based on their reading score with like-scoring peers. I am working on using the depth and complexity icons with an informative article with the highest group, close reading and comprehension with the next group, and reading/decoding with the lowest two groups. In math, we have completed module 1, which was all about Figuring The Facts. We learned sorting and graphing, number facts with the number rack, introducing addition and subtraction strategies, and fluency with addition facts to 20. We are currently in the middle of unit 2, which is place value and measurement. We have done counting and modeling two and three-digit numbers and measuring with tens. We started adding on an open number line on Friday and will be finishing those activities this week. Next week, we will be finishing the unit by practicing to think in twos. Our next unit (unit 3) will be on addition and subtraction within 100, to preview what is to come. In ELA, we have completed unit 1, which was Friends and Family, with a focus on narrative writing. Grammar included statements and questions, sentence capitalization and punctuation, commands and exclamation, subjects, letter punctuation, predicates, commas in a sequence, expanding and combining sentences, and quotation marks. In unit 2, we are focusing on Animal Discoveries with a focus on genre writing to inform. In grammar, we will focus on nouns: singular, plural, and possessive. At the end of this unit, we will have an assessment week for both units 1 and 2, as well as a week for student animal projects before conference week. Can't wait to see what they come up with! I am looking forward to FALLing into more learning as we continue into October and November! <3 Mrs. Patel Happy Spring room 5 parents!
We have been doing a lot since my last post in the fall. We couldn't have done it without the help and support from all of you! I am lucky to have such wonderful parents this year. Most recently, we finished up our big class Science project on the fat content in milk. We had to use food coloring and dish soap to find out which was the most fatty: 2% milk, soy milk, or eggnog. Through our investigations in December and January, we learned that 2% milk has the highest fat content because the dish soap bonded the quickest with the fat, pushing the food color out the fastest. You can see our final presentation that was turned into the school Science Fair here: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1mckLS5qf39OsVY5vRak4r3-qs4x9ZF0aQUF57XVKFow/edit#slide=id.p1. The good new is that our class received a third place ribbon! Way to go room 5! We will continue Science from this point on, working on our Learning Sequence with Sound. We have already learned that vibrations create sound and will be completing lessons based on hearing, seeing, and feeling sound. In math, we have been looking at the characteristics of 2D shapes. We learned what a quadrilateral is and how many different types there are (parallelogram, rhombus, trapezoid, etc.) We also learned how to count the sides and vertices on these shapes. To investigate further, we looked into hexagons and pentagons. In our addition math race, we have 3 students currently working on their 5s and one student working on 4s, which is where we should be by conference time next month. Please practice addition facts to 10 with your child at home. Practice sheets were sent home in the fall. In Language Arts, our unit was titled "Animals Everywhere". Each week, we used writing, grammar, and phonics to discuss how animals' bodies help them, how animals help each other, how animals survive in nature, what insects they knew about and how they are alike or different, and how people work with animals. We are closing our unit with an animal research project, which is due on FEBRUARY 11th! My next blog post will be at the end of April or beginning of May. See you back here then! For now, you can refer back to this site for upcoming calendar dates and event information, as well as links to our TBP toolkit. Mrs. Patel |
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May 2021
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