Newsletter: August 27th

     Welcome back!

     It was great to see all the kids again after such a long (or short, depending on your perspective) summer! They had lots of fun stories to share about sleepovers, trips to the pool, visiting family, and special vacations.

     Much of our first few days have been spent reconnecting and slowly getting back into the flow of the school day.  With a new school year comes a new schedule. Our daily forecast this year looks like this:

8:00    Explorations
8:30    Morning Meeting
8:55    Writing Workshop
9:50    Reading Workshop
10:50  Lunch
11:30  Special Areas
12:25  Recess
12:55  Math
1:50    Science/Social Studies
2:30    Clean Up/Read Aloud
2:50    Dismissal

Our special areas rotation this year looks like this:

Monday -- Library
Tuesday -- Art
Wednesday -- Music
Thursday -- PE (Don't forget to wear tennis shoes!)
Friday -- Computer

     We're starting this year by looking back on some of the things we learned in second grade as a means of getting our brains primed for lots of new studies together. For example, we're continuing our study of cursive from last May, planning for strong reading choices this year (while listening to each other's Summer Reading Projects), revisiting computation skills with and without regrouping, and extending our knowledge of animals to a larger study of environments and habitats.

Here are some pics from our first week...

We've been able to move through cursive pretty quickly since we already
learned the lower-case letters last spring. I suspect most the kids didn't do
much, if any, cursive writing over the summer but they're picking it right up
again with great ease. We'll finish up the lower-case letters this week then move
on to upper-case letters next week. In addition to cursive we'll also be working
a good bit this year to build keyboarding skills. In third grade we get our own
Chromebook cart so the kids are often free to type some aspects of their work
rather than write it out on paper.

In addition to cursive the kids are also beginning their very first pieces of the
school year. Because our focus is on cursive (but we don't know all the letters
just yet) they are free to work on a "free piece" of their choosing. We have writers
creating play scripts, non-fiction pieces, memory stories, realistic fiction, and
fantasy stories. Lots of creative ideas!

We played a fun probability game in math that called on us to
cumulatively add a series of numbers while also taking
into the consideration the likelihood of rolling a one on the
die. It was a nice opportunity to revisit the important of carefully
lining up multi-digit numbers when adding them.

In reading we've been sharing our Summer Reading Projects. Our student teacher,
Ms. Delcoco, started us off by telling us all about the books she's read in the past
month or two. 

We're about halfway through these presentations and from what we've seen so far
there were so many great books being read this summer. They're presentations have
been really interesting. I'm thinking now of creating a special basket where we can
house everyone's "Book Recommendation" title so we can all read these same
wonderful titles. 

We've also jumped back in to our daily independent reading routine. The kids
generally get about 20-30 minutes to read each day. As the year progresses this
will grow to 25-40 minutes daily. Remember, they should also be reading a minimum of
20 minutes each night at home as well.

In Explorations our choices for the first week included a variety of games such as
Othello (pictured above), chess, Apples to Apples, and Boggle.

There are also a number of Exploration choices at the science table. The kids can view
different objects through the microscope, sort rocks by different attributes, weight objects
around the room, and (eventually) observe animals in our "Visiting Critter" tank.

And of course everyone was thrilled to see Nugget again!