Mrs. Bice's Second Grade

March is Reading Month

Every Thursday in the month of March we will have Forest Hills Football players come and read books with our class! The kids just LOVED having the high school players come in and read with them! We can’t wait to see them next week!

We also finished a class read aloud: The Wild Robot. The students have LOVED this book! Every day they begged for us to read it and we finally finished it this morning. This book brought lots of emotions out of all of us… even tears! Ask your 2nd grader about it! They would love to tell you all about it!

Classroom Culture

This week we revisited all of our classroom and school rules and why we have them! At this point in the year, we are all family. Sometimes family members have conflict! We spent a lot of time this week discussing common conflicts in the class and how to support each other. Many times students aren’t assuming “positive intent” and assume that someone is out to hurt them! The students came to realize that a lot of times, these are just misunderstandings. The more we can talk about these conflicts the more buy in the students have to resolve the conflicts in a restorative way!

Workshop Norms

In room 248 the students are expected to be incredibly independent at this point in the year. Getting started right away, working the whole time, having a growth mindset, stamina to read or write for 45 minutes, etc! Slowly what happens in the month of March is we get “comfortable” and our routines and rituals start to slip! On Thursday collaborative groups worked together to discuss Workshop Norms and what it should looks like, sounds like, and feels like when we have workshop. Then students walked around and starred thins they agreed with on others posters. At the end we came together to create a chart with the responsibility of the students and the teacher. Students then chose a goal to work on for the remainder of the week! Workshop went incredibly well! Every now and then we just need a reminder of the expectations and then everything else falls back into place :)

Writer’s Workshop

We have had a ton of fun writing Gripping Realistic Fiction stories! This week we worked on making sure our stories had a problem in it and a good plan for how the characters can resolve that problem! We added in a lot of emotion for our characters so the reader can feel like they are right there in the story!

Book in a Bag

I try to encourage students to read every single night at home! The best part is that now you probably have books in your home that your child can read and are just right for them! If your family loves the routine of having books in a bag… great! If they read at a level L and below, this means they have not reached the end of the year benchmark yet and it is VITAL they read every night! Whether its books from our classroom or books in your home! I am hoping that I have encouraged your child to live a “reading life” and they just read for enjoyment at home before bed! My philosophy as an educator is not to mandate your child brings a book home and reads but that we (you and I) have instilled in them a love for learning and reading! The minute we mandate something, they lose the love and ownership for it! If your child is someone who you have to pull teeth to read at home, please bring it up at conferences and we can find some ways to change their thinking!