Newsletter: January 14

This week's newsletter is being written by our new student teacher (MAT), Mr. Smith. Read on to find out what's been going on in the classroom...

Introducing Mr. Smith

Hello to everyone! I'm really excited to enter this great community of bright and talented 2nd graders. This will be my second semester at CFI (I was in Mr. Johnson's class last semester) and my final semester of the MAT program at USC. Prior to this year, I worked for about 7 years as an elementary teacher in South Korea, moving back to South Carolina with my wife in April of 2015.

All the kids were really welcoming this week as I started getting to know and working along side them. I've been blown away so far with how brilliant they are. I'm really excited for what this semester will bring.

Book Clubs

In reading, we got started on book clubs. In book clubs, students will read the same book and then come back together to discuss what they read. We began by browsing different options for books and then started our clubs on Tuesday. Each club worked together to set the page numbers they needed to read for their discussions. In order to promote discussions, they wrote down thoughts on sticky notes as they read  to keep track of their thinking along the way and spur discussions in their book clubs.

While thinking about our book club discussions, we started to think about how to turn our ideas into a conversation. Instead of just sitting around and listing off our observations in a circle, we thought about ways we might connect to and build upon what others in our clubs had observed. Everyone did a great job coming up with and implementing ways to make their book club discussions real conversations! 

Poetry

In writing workshop this week we began reading and writing poems. We started the week exploring the rhythm and patterns of poems in groups. We broke off into groups, each one with a different poem. The groups worked together to figure out how their poem should sound. We discovered different ways authors use words and structure to convey rhythm in their poetry.

We then went out to write our own poems with the different mentor poems in mind. After a few minutes of writing, many of our authors had stumbled on to the first type of poem we wanted to study, circular poems. Many of the students wrote great poems with the first line repeated at the end of the poem. We then moved on to our second type of poem, a couplet, a short two-line poems that rhymes. All the poets were creating great poems which we are excited to share soon!

Money

This week we started inquiry into money by making a chart about all the things they noticed on pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters. They all made excellent observations and asked some great questions about their coins. We will move into graphing the dates and other observations about coins to notice patterns followed by diving into different combinations that can be made with coins to make the same monetary value.