Blog & Newsletters

Literacy We have been loving winding down our fairy tale unit in reading and our nonfiction writing unit! Friday we will have a small celebration to celebrate all of our accomplishments in reading and writing. Please have all school books returned by Friday! Phonics We kicked off a mini unit on Word Collecting this week. We read a fabulous book titled Word Collectors which was about a boy named Jerome who collected tons and tons of words.

Reader’s Workshop We have been LOVING learning about the world of fairy tales and folktales! This week, readers we focused on how characters respond to a challenge and the emotions and feelings that impact their thought process. We have also been enjoying acting out some of the fairy tales to really grasp what adventures our characters are encountering! Writer’s Workshop Writing has been lots of fun! We have really been enjoying learning about all the different genres of nonfiction genre.

Reader’s Workshop In Readers Workshop we began to learn more about the world of fairy tales and folktales. We looked closely at dialogue and how important it is to read like the character! This really helps us to better understand how the character is feeling, thinking and even their point of view. We also learned how characters can encounter the same situation or problem but have completely different point of views.

Literacy Celebration We LOVED celebrating all things series and opinions! It was really fun to see how our reading unit and writing unit intertwined! We finished our Series Clubs by readers learning how to debate and picking a side to state their opinion about their character! It was really fun to hear how much kids learned about their character which is such a big piece of understanding more difficult text.

Literacy We are wrapping up our unit on Series Book Clubs and readers were given the task of deciding how they want to share a series they love! They spent time planning how they will share and reread parts of their series book! Some of them created presentations to teach others all the reasons they love their series while others chose to write post-its and thinking behind to help the next reader!

Readers Workshop Readers have been working really hard with their series clubs to become experts on their characters over the past 2 weeks! This week we also took a closer look at becoming an expert on the author’s craft. Now that we are reading chapter books it’s important to pay close attention to the precise words that the author uses. Sometimes we have to reread text a few times to really understand what the author is trying to convey!

Reader’s Workshop We kicked off a new unit this week titled: Series Book Clubs. Readers will become experts on a particular series of books. I assigned kids different series to focus on and they have been working in a Club to become experts. We began by them collecting information about the main characters in their series. One way readers can do this is by paying close attention to what they learn about the characters.

Readers Workshop We took the this short week and a half to work on some comprehension skills while reading nonfiction text! Young kids burst through the door bubbling with questions! As the students read nonfiction and meet new information, they brim with questions. As they try to answer their questions, the discover new information and gain knowledge. Instead of demanding answers all the time, we need to teach kids to ask thoughtful and insightful questions!

Reader’s Workshop The students had a blast working on their fluency through Reader’s Workshop! On Monday, the students began the week by reading a St.Patrick’s Day poem and we reviewed everything we know about fluency. That prepared the readers to transition into our Reader’s Theatre groups! The kids had a blast working in groups to practice their lines, decode words, act and create props! Our final performances are today the kids could not be more proud and excited to show off all their hard work to their classmates.

Literacy Celebration We had an amazing week of celebrating our hard work in Phonics and Reader’s Workshop! In Phonics we culminated our unit by reviewing patterns in the endings of words! We learned a ton of common endings over the last few weeks: -ly, -ed, -ing, -tion, -s, -es, -ies, etc. The 2nd graders should be noticing these endings in their reading as well as spelling them in their writing.