I'm Back

My life has gone a little crazy the last couple of months. I apologize for not blogging more regularly. It is 2:30 am and I am waiting for my son to arrive home from Logan after working 16 hours between two jobs. I am awake to call him every few minutes to make sure he stays awake on the drive home. It has been a very productive evening as the family is sleeping and I have had no distractions. I have graded every paper that I have brought home to grade including the 30 late papers from various students that come back at different times so of course they have to be graded and entered individually rather than with the group of like papers. Please encourage your child to stay on task and complete their work in class. Then I would not need to send work home with a "Finish and Return" tag on it.

Homework
Just a reminder - I am now sending home one math and one language arts homework page each Monday. These are stapled and stamped with the red "Homework" stamp. These need to be completed and returned by Friday. Other Math homework from our math program will also be stamped and will come home as we come to it in the book. It should regularly be completed and returned the following day. However, on Wednesday evening I want you to focus on spelling practice with your child so if I ever send a math sheet home on Wed. it will be due on Friday.

Each night your child should be reading 15-20 minutes and writing one response sentence in their RRJ. They should also be studying spelling and math facts each night. They especially need to work on subtraction facts.

Stone Soup
The Second Grade will be producing the mini-musical "Stone Soup" this month. Twenty-one students have speaking parts. All the students will be singing in the chorus and three students will have solo parts. We will use our rotation time for the next three weeks to prepare for this event. We will have two dress rehearsals, they will be at 9 am on Wed. and Thurs. Feb. 22 and 23. The actual performance will be on Thursday Feb. 23rd at 10:30 am in the gym.

If your student was chosen for a special part please support them and help them memorize their part quickly. The narrators can read their lines. If your child will not be here on Feb. 22 or 23 please let me know ASAP.

Math
Last week I sent home two yellow pages explaining the patterning and ratio work we are doing right now. We should complete that unit this week.

Reading
I am in the process of individually testing each student on their reading skills. We will be offering a special 15 min. per night homework program to the families of students who did not meet the state benchmark or other students who might be struggling with fluency. This will replace the 15-20 min. of reading and RRJ for those students. Look for a letter soon to see if your child is invited to participate.

Spelling
This week we will be focusing on past tense verbs. We have been finding the irregular past tense verbs in our shared reading of the book "Henry Box Brown". These would be words like: catch/ caught, fly/flew, see/saw, send/sent, etc.

For spelling we will focus on words ending in -ed. These words might have one of three different sounds even though they are all spelled with an -ed.
Example: worked ends with the /t/ sound
turned ends with the /d/ sound and words like
tested end with the /ed/ or /id/ sound

Writing
The students have been working on skills in writing opinions. They are getting better at this as the year goes on. They will make a mini PowerPoint Presentation in computers this week.

They will also be writing a narrative piece about either: how they would escape to freedom or how they would fight for equal rights. It sounds like high level stuff but these kids have really gained a lot of knowledge and understanding about "The Long Journey to Freedom" that African-Americans have had to travel. This is the title of Unit 4 in the new Language Arts Common Core.



I will finish this blog entry in the morning, or rather later in the day as it is now 3:30 am.

I will tell you that the keyword is "grandson".