The Fontaine Flier
September 13, 2013
Midterm Progress Reports Sent Home Today
Midterm grades were sent home today. In the beginning of second grade we spend a lot of time working on rules and procedures. We also do a lot of work together as a class or in small groups. Because of this, there are not a large amount of graded assignments to report at this time. Letter grades are given in spelling, reading and math. Along with the midterm reports, you should have also received a blue behavior rubric filled out by me and a white behavior rubric filled out by your child. If you have any questions, please feel free to e-mail me this weekend.
Do You Know the Difference Between a Frog and a Toad?
Things were hopping down here in second grade this week as we studied frogs and toads! Much of our learning centered around our anchor text, one of my favorites, Days with Frog and Toad by Arnold Lobel. Our latest project involves making an informational video using a computer program called Animoto, comparing the characteristics of both frogs and toads. Animoto is a wonderful free site that helps create amazing slide shows with text, photos, videos and music. (www.animoto.com) After I looked on Youtube for quality educational videos on frogs and toads, and not finding any, we decided to create our own! Students have been busy researching. using informational text, and creating story boards to help plan out their videos. We will be producing our videos in the computer lab on Wednesday, September 18th from 12:30-1:30 if anyone is free and willing to help out, we'd love the extra support. By using both fiction and informational texts this week, students discovered the different ways we read each type of text and how text features like the glossary, index, and table of contents help us with the information. If you don't know the difference between a frog and a toad, just ask your second grader!
Meadow Lane 60th Anniversary Picture
We will be taking our Meadow Lane 60th picture on Friday morning at 10:00. We ask that all students wear red or black on this day.
Jog-a-thon-Tuesday, September 17! See you there!
Thank you so much for supporting Meadow Lane! Money from the jog-a-thon helps support field trips and many other outstanding programs for our Meadow Lane students.
Coming Up Next Week...
Reading-Wilson Sat Alone
Comprehension focus-schema/making connections/compare & contrast/narrative elements/making and confirming predictions
Math-We will be finishing up Topic 2: Addition Strategies in math. After realizing we were ahead of the district math schedule, I decided to give them a couple extra days to help develop these addition mental math strategies. To help us add numbers in our heads, we have practiced adding doubles, near doubles, making ten when adding three numbers, using 10 to add 9 or when adding 8, and making 10 in general when adding any number using a ten frame. The Topic 2 test and Topic two vocabulary test will now be on Tuesday.
Writing-parts of a sentence, nouns and verbs, writing a friendly letter to our fourth grade buddies, writer's workshop.
Science-More Food Safety with Sam in preparation for our KSU field trip.
Social Studies-Patriotic symbols, Constitution Day-What is the constitution and why is it important?
Food Safety Field Trip-Monday, September 23 1:00-3:00
I will need a couple of volunteers to walk over to the KSU building with us and to help supervise a group of kids during the activity. If you are willing to accompany us, please let me know.
Spelling List 5
Regular List pattern -at & -ate
sat
ate
acrobat
flat
that
fat
gate
appreciate
create
state
worried
studied
so
these
would
children
each
girl
Challenge List
scratch
graze
pattern
shake
graph
Vocabulary Words for the Week
Reading
amazing
clustered
gathered
raced
wandered
Math-Topic 2 (for test on Tuesday)
doubles
near doubles
addend
number sentence
sum
Science
amphibian
Congratulations to our Students of the Week-Skylar Jones and Gracyn Jones!
Specials Schedule
Monday-Computer/Spanish
Tuesday-P.E./Music
Wednesday-Library/Spanish
Thursday-Art
Friday-P.E./Music
The Paper Bag Princess Comes to Meadow Lane!
In conjunction with our author study on Robert Munsch, and to work on our reading fluency, students wanted to practice this story as a play. Each day, students get with their small groups and practice for about 10 minutes. I will make sure to video tape the performances and share them with you!