October Newsletter from Mrs. Hedberg

Happy fall everyone, I can’t believe that it is already October. Let me first remind you that later this month is our one and only, parent teacher conference for the year. You will be receiving a conference time for one of two dates  October 24^th or  October 25^th .

October will bring our first classroom party. The afternoon will be full of fun learning. Our Math lesson will be all about estimation, place value, and counting by 10’s. If you have any giant pumpkins or sunflower heads that you can donate for that day please contact Mrs. Hedberg. Following our Pumpkin Math activity we will have time for games and trick or treats.  I am still looking for someone that would like to organize our first fall party. Call me if your interested and I can give you a list of parents that can send in items needed for the party and help if needed. Second grade will also be going to see the play Peter Pan for our first field trip of the year, stay tune for more information.  The field trip will be planned on October 24th.
 

Math: We are very fortunate to have the ability and staffing to extend learning for our accelerated math learners these times have been built into the weekly schedule and have already begun. I will send notice if your child is participating in any extended math learning with Mrs. Young our GT teacher. The second grade team has been working hard on a new curriculum map for the Common Core math standards I hope to soon provide you with information on what standards are being covered in math by quarter, along with at home suggested activities (like the math passport) that you can do at home with your child in place of traditional homework sheets.

Reading: We have three more weeks of our “Sharing Stories” theme. We have been building lots of comprehension strategies and skills such as making connections, making predictions, clarifying and monitoring text. Our next theme will be “Kindness” a perfect connection to the character virtues we study each month. Life’s most urgent question is what are you doing for others? “Love and Kindness are never wasted”. This month we will begin our at home reading incentive program called "Book It".  I encourage you to set a reading goal for your child and participate as a parent, you have the power to boost your children's learning potential simply by making books an integral part of their daily lives. I will provide a Book-It calendar each month through April of this year. Log the minutes read at home and return the calendar at the end of each month to receive  a free Pizza from Pizza Hut.  Happy Reading!

Character: This month is our Virtue of Thankfulness and Respect. Mrs. Davis our school counselor presents a lesson once a month on the Virtues. We will be reading many stories during our reading unit that lend themselves to teaching the virtues. We read from Aesop’s Fables and discussed many morals of the stories. ~

 

Sincerely,

Mrs. Hedberg

Check out what's going on in math

2.NBT.4 compare two and three digit numbers using <,=,> symbols
Dinner conversation: Ask your child to look at the food items on his/her dinner plate and see if they can make a number sentence. Example 12peas are less than 20 noodles!

Privilege Coupons!!

Students earn their way to the classroom treasure chest full of small toys, books, and various privilege coupons. They also can earn school wide Mustang Shine Tickets that go into a drawing each week for fun rewards and events such as dress up the teacher day!! This week McKinnon earned the privilege to lead Mustangs in Motion in the Gym and Melissa and John got to dress up their teacher!

Cookie Dough Fundraiser

This week we kicked off our school wide fundraiser.  
The funds that are generated from this fundraiser
 helps to offset the costs of field trips, technology, 
art, playground equipment, assemblies and many 
other opportunities that your child may 

not otherwise have.  Please be an active 
participant in this fundraiser by taking your child
 to family and friends' home and encouraging those 
relationships to support your child’s education.  
You can also take the order form to work with you 

and collect orders for your child.  I encourage every 
family to participate.   The class with the highest 
sales will be rewarded $150.

Teacher assistant

Meet Miss Maria our student aide from Middleton High. Miss Maria helps our class three days a week in the mornings and gets elective credit. Maria plans to have a career in education.

Math is Fun

Spelling and Reading

Dear Parents,

Next week we will begin our first ,reading big reading unit as well as  begin our spellings program.  Each Monday the students will receive a spelling list to bring home this list will also be added to the blog I willt post the new list jeach Friday for the following week. During Monday's lesson students will be introduced to the spelling patterns for the week and engage in various spelling activities.  A list of words will come home with the pattern highlighted the sheet is designed so that it may be folded and a pretest may be given at home in order to let your child know what words they may want to study.  Don't forget to look on the back of your child's Daily work folder of suggested activities for spelling practice if needed.  The first ten words follow a spelling pattern challenge words have been added in the form of vocabulary from our reading in order to provide for advanced learners. Spelling grades are taken from the first ten words on the list. 

Pillows for our class

I mentioned to the kids that we could use more reading pillows and the next week Mckinnon made one for the class. Thank you McKinnon! If anyone else has sewing talents please contact me we'd still love to add more. We hope to fill the whole wall.

Mrs. Hedberg's September Newsletter

Newsletter for Month of September 2012 

The students have completed a weeks worth of initial assessments including the fall IRI. You may view students IRI reading scores and words read per minute through Skyward gradebook as well as weekly graded subjects at anytime.  The words per minute break down is as follows for the Fall IRI: 
                                                                                               0-26 wpm= 1  Intensive Intervention needed
                                                                                             27-53 wpm= 2  Strategic Intervention needed
                                                                                             54-above wpm = Benchmark on Grade Level

Math:  Our first Unit is underway we are working on the new Common Core Standard : Number & Operation in Base Ten. One thing has changed this year, your child will not be given a homework sheet of math from the days lesson.  You may see work or evidence of learning that will come home
in various forms, such as Today's number lesson, Envisions skill sheets, Drops in the Bucket skills sheets, these will hopefully give you an idea of concepts and learning of target standards. I will also try to post pictures from our lessons on the blog as well.  In response to my survey of would you like additional math or practice provided or optional practice 99% of you said yes!!  I am working to create what will be called a Passport of Learning for Math,  that will soon be added to the back of your child's Daily Work Communication forlder. The passport page will be filled with one project or activity to do at home that applies to each of  target standards we are learning for Numbers and Operations in Base Ten.  Your child will be able to retrun his/her passport when it is done for stamps to earn I-pad, computer , or time playing game boards etc.  The Passport for Math will also help to inform you the parent of what concepts your child is learning and see them demonstrate mastery of the target!  You will here more about this soon~  I'm very excited about this idea and hope you will find it a fun and engaging way to be involved in your childs learning (rather than sitting with homework sheets nightly)!

Reading: Our first theme in

Open Court Reading

is “Sharing Stories”.  We will be sharing fables, fairytales and poetry the students will be reading fractured fairytales like The Three Little Figs, and Come Back Jack.  As an extension to our unit the students will be  writing a class fractured fairytale based on the Three Little Pigs.  As we begin each unit of reading you will have the option of downloading additional practice sheets at home off the blog, if you choose for your child to do these at home please do them the week I have dated as this would be a follow up to the phonics, sight words, vocabulary of what is learned in class. If your child has scored a 1 or 2 on the IRI I would encourage you to concider this option at home.

Character:  We will continue working on building our classroom climate and setting classroom goals and expectations of what our class should look like, sound like, and feel like when we are learning in a safe and loving environment.  Students have been building our classroom community in a variety of activities over these first few weeks of school.  We have celebrated our differences and diversity through reading and writing .  We read All About ME and wrote about what we liked best about ourselves, students selected their best feature and wrote explaining why they thought it was their best attribute.  The students also created a Classroom honey comb filled with "sweet" character virtues to help us stick together as a class community!