2011 Semester: Day Two

You may have heard the teacher left at lunch to go to the doctor. One and a half days into the new semester, and the sinuses won. Today's post will be a description of what we did before I left, and what the sub did according to the lessons plans left for her.

We began doing daily language arts morning work today. This program is called "A Drop in the Bucket". The worksheets consist of about 10 questions that cover basic usage skills such as possessives, pronouns, contractions, plurals and phonetic spelling skills. We will do this each morning before free reading time. Before we go to Calendar Time, Mrs. O will go over the sheets on the document camera so that we can correct our own mistakes. (Did you know brain research shows the best way to learn something is to make your own corrections on incorrect work? That is why students always correct their own trial spelling tests.)

We recorded reading minutes. See if your child can figure out multiples of 60 to find out how many hours a certain number of minutes makes. (Example: 1 x 60= 60, 2 x 60=120, 3 x 60=180 etc. The students are learning that multiplication really consists of "skip counting": in this case they are skip counting by 6s.)

We continued to work on our New Year's Resolutions. We are "stretching" our writing from yesterday. Each resolution must contain a series of three different ideas. This also helps us learn to use commas in a series. (Example: I resolve to make my lesson plans more detailed by knowing what each child needs, making sure the lessons capture the interest of the students, and by giving multiple options to enable different interests.) (Students mostly wrote about how they planned to brush their teach better, help mom in the kitchen, and learn subtraction/addition facts.)

Mrs. O cleaned out our classroom library over the holidays. She had several extra books, and today she let us all chose a book to take for our home library.

After lunch our sub, Mrs. H, came. For Social Studies we talked about time lines and how they are written in chronological order. We looked through our work portfolios and began making notes for a timeline of the first semester of our year. We enjoyed recess outside today.

In Math? POCKET DAY! Today was day 80 of our wonderful second grade year. We had a snack and then Mrs. AL came for Spanish. We packed our backpacks, cleaned the floor, and listened to the sub read a book. Time to go home! Look for report cards in the agendas today. Please sign and return the envelope as soon as possible. You keep the report card. NOTE: Any writing on the computer copy was put there by our principal, Ms. R. She looks over all the report cards in the school!

Tomorrow is library day. Don't forget your books so you can check out a new one.

A couple of observations by the teacher (who spent the afternoon napping on the couch in an antibiotic haze, watching daytime TV off and on): Judge Joe Brown is tough on crime, Peter Frampton no longer has hair, and Lifetime movies never end well. I'll be glad to be back in the classroom tomorrow!

(PS: Thanks to my former student Autumn for changing our blog design for January!)