Sept. 30

Here we are.. at the end of September! It's a bit strange to think that it was already a month ago that I was meeting all of you. Time has sped by at record speed -  don't you agree?!

We had a great Terry Fox Run today and as a class we raised over $35 dollars! What an accomplishment. Thank you to everyone who donated, took part, and even came to cheer us on. It was such a great feeling to see all those kids out there today running for a common cause and doing their best. 

Over the past few weeks, we have been learning about mindfulness and practicing some simple mindfulness techniques. If you are not aware of what mindfulness is, it is allowing ourselves to be aware of our thoughts, feelings, and surroundings at the present moment. We practice techniques such as breathing, visualization, and class discussions. We often do this after we have had a really exciting time, such as gym, lunch or a big group activity. We have all found that this helps us refocus and get into a better mental state to learn.  We will continue to do this through the year and share with you how this improves our learning and focus.  

If you are interested in reading more about the research behind mindfulness in schools, this article is really good. http://www.mindfulschools.org/about-mindfulness/research/

There are also several great you tube channels such as Zen Den and apps such as Smiling Mind. Here is a link to some other good websites and apps for kids. 

Have a great weekend everyone! See you in October ;)

Sept. 29

Today we had our first guest teacher Mrs. Duncan and the students did wonderful job of making her feel welcome in our school and classroom!  Because of the good choices of all the students, our classroom didn't resemble the above cartoon at all! In fact, she left a little note explaining how hardworking and kind the students were this morning and I think that made us all feel proud. Thank you to all the students for being so responsible, respectful and friendly today.

In math, we are continuing to look at ways that shapes are used all around us. We have been doing shape hunts in the school and we will use this technique during our community walk next week when we look at shapes in playgrounds. 
We used our 3D shapes to create structures in the real world. Check out the park and the skatepark below. Notice the careful attention to the angles in the skatepark for jumps and the cones in the park to represent the trees. 

      

Skatepark

 

Park

We have also just started working on a new open ended math problem where students need to use their knowledge of faces and vertices with shapes. We have not had time to completely finish this so please don't give away the answer. 

"I have 2 3-D shapes in my basket. Together, they have 7 faces and a point. What shapes could they be?"

As a family, you could easily adapt this question for 2D or 3D shapes by asking a question like "I am thinking of 2 shapes... they have ___ corners and ___ edges".  For best results think of a statement that has a couple different answers. Children can draw the shapes to help them or even use real life objects in the house. 

Coming up:

Terry Fox Run tomorrow. Bring a Toonie for Terry!

Community walks Monday and Wednesday 1:00 - 2:30. Volunteers still needed!

Sept. 28

Today we had our first fire drill of the year - and we did so well! We took it very seriously and made sure they we took care of ourselves by exiting out quietly and quickly, holding the door for ourselves and walking (not running!) to a safe place in the field.  All the students should be so proud of their good choices during that time today.  We will continue to have fire drills throughout the year to practice good safety in case of a real emergency.

Each day, we have been taking some time to talk about Terry Fox. His story is one that touches hearts no matter the age. We watched a short video about Terry that you may want to watch as a family (you may need some Kleenex nearby!)
Terry Fox Video

Over the last two days we have also focused on what a hero is. We discussed the difference between superheroes like Superman and heroes like Terry Fox. We have explored why Terry Fox has become such an important hero to many Canadians. Some  follow up questions you could talk about with your child are:

-What did Terry Fox do?
-What is a hero?Why was this special or unique?
-Why do you think Terry Fox is a hero?
-Who are some other heroes that you know and why?

We also try to put ourselves in his shoes when we go outside to run. (not literally, but wouldn't that be neat!) We have run in the sunny warm weather, but also in the windy chilly weather. Although we only jog for a few minutes, we can still feel how Terry may have felt on his marathon runs each day. 

Coming up:

Mrs. Jordan away tomorrow morning

Terry Fox Friday morning. Bring Toonies for Terry!

Could this be our playground?

Dear Parents,

The Grade Two Team is beginning an Inquiry project on “Playgrounds”.  This is tied to our math study of 2D and 3D shapes as well as our Social Studies inquiry on Canadian Communities.  As you are aware, Ken Taylor school has began their fundraising for our school to have its own playground.  As students have experienced not having a playground, they have become curious about designing and building a playground. This has sparked them to wonder about what might our Ken Taylor Playground look like? Students will look at the design process from the perspective of many different lenses including parents, students, and teachers. In order for us to begin our project, we are going to go on community walks.  We are in need of 5 volunteers to come on these walks with us.

We are planning to go on October 3 and October 5 from 1:00 - 2:30.  If you are able to volunteer and have the volunteer clearance, please send us an email.  Due to a CBE policy, parents will not be able to bring siblings or small children when volunteering. You will be required to be at the school from 1:00 - 2:30 p.m.  We will follow up with volunteers by Friday with a confirmation.

Sincerely,

The Grade Two Team

Sarah Jordan  Smjordan@cbe.ab.ca

Coming up:

• Fire Drill tomorrow
• Mrs. Jordan away at Professional Development Thursday morning
• Terry Fox Run Friday afternoon. Bring your Twoonies for Terry
• Continue bringing in your Me Shoeboxes!

Sept. 26

Happy Monday to everyone! I hope it was a restful weekend for you all!

The students came in ready to learn today and were so engaged throughout the day!

Today we started doing a reading response after our Daily 5 Read to Self and Read to Someone.  For fiction books, we are working on giving a brief summary, describing the characters, and describing the setting.  As we progress, we will add more details and start inferring and predicting.

For non fiction books, we are writing about what we learned, what we found interesting and recording any wonders we still have.  Here are a few of the responses below:

Non Fiction reader response

Non Fiction reader response

Fiction reader response

Fiction reader response

We also started looking at our Me Shoeboxes and guessing whose box belonged to who. I presented mine and I think I actually stumped the class with the objects I brought.  Feel free to send yours in whenever you are ready. We would like to have them all in by the end of the week if possible. Take a peek:

Hobby: Reading. I love Calvin and Hobbes!
Place I have been: Disneyland. I went for my honeymoon.
What I wanted to be when I grow up: a teacher or a vet (It would have been too obvious if I had put a teacher object!)
Family: this is my grandparents wedding photo 

Coming up: 
Mrs. Jordan away Thursday morning for professional development opportunity
Terry Fox Run Friday afternoon. Bring a Twoonie for Terry!
RAZ kids home reading will start next week. Stay tuned for more info

Sept. 23

Next week, we will be starting “Me Shoeboxes”!! This is a great opportunity to practice oral sharing, using clues, and active listening. Next week, please send a shoebox (or similar sized box or container) that is filled with items that represent you!

We will be using these boxes for two purposes:

1. To inspect and make guesses on the owner based on the items inside. Just for fun,we will share the shoeboxes anonymously and then try to guess whose is

whose.

2. To use the items for classroom oral sharing (more information about this will come mid- October).

Please plan to keep these items at school for a couple months as we will display the boxes on our shelves until we complete all of our oral sharing.

Send the following items in a box to school by October 3:

1. Something that represents your favourite hobby or activity to do in your spare time.
2. Something that represents what you might want to be when you grow up.
3. A picture of your family (for the first part of this activity, we will put a post it note over your face so that we can guess!)
4. Something that represents a place you have been or would like to go in the world

Please DO NOT send anything expensive or precious to you.

If you do not have an item that represents these things in your house, please feel free to send a photo, make or draw something.

We look forward having some fun guessing!

Reminders:
No School tomorrow: Professional Development Day

Sept. 21

Happy Last Day of Summer!  Driving to work today, I noticed how the trees have already changed and have brought that beautiful golden colour of autumn to Calgary.  We are so lucky to live in such a beautiful city aren't we?

We continue our investigation into shapes and today we had a really tricky problem.  We were asked to find which shapes would fit into a triangle.  This took lots of determination, hardwork, and even required us to rethink our ideas several times. We saw firsthand how important it was to have a growth mindset for a problem like this.

One possible solution to this problem...

We will continue to do a variety of open ended math problems like this throughout the year as it will help us see math in new ways. It will also help us understand that there isn't always one right answer and that we can find different solutions to the same problem. 

Reminders:

No School Friday for students

Sept. 20

What a dreary day!  The rain and grey clouds continued all day, but we didn't let that ruin our fun!  We went outside today for a shorter gym and continued to increase our running stamina  in order to prepare for the Terry Fox Run. Today we ran for 6 minutes with minimal walk breaks! Well done everyone:) If you want to know more about Terry Fox, click this link.http://www.terryfox.org/SchoolRun/
There is a lot on this site about him, the run, and the fundraising.

We also spent some time playing a game called "Tribond".  This is where one person gives three clues and the other person needs to guess what those three clues have in common. Example: leash, fur, paws = dog

We used used this game to help review the concept of community from Grade 1. What does a community have and why are those parts important? This work will lay the groundwork for our future work on Canadian Communities. In small groups, we made some mind maps to show the parts of a community. Check out some of the things we came up with below!

To Watch for:
Your child should come home with black folder today. This is a folder to send notes, letters and work back and forth from home to school. This black folder can stay in their backpack but will need to be checked each morning at school and afternoon at home by students to check for anything inside. This should help prevent lost and crumpled papers!
Some of your children will have a Volunteer Form from the office to fill out. Please send back in the folder when it is done.

Sept. 19

Last week at the Parent Night, I spoke a little about my educational beliefs and passions.  Brain research and development and growth mindsets are some of them. I found this article on the weekend and thought I would share with you to give you more background on some of the ideas we are talking about and focusing on in class.  If you want more information about this, please let me know.
Growth Mindsets for kids

Today in writing, we reviewed what makes a sentence. We even learned the proper terminology of subject and predicate, which are tough words!  Ask your child what these parts are and why they are important for a sentence.  Here is a short video with a catchy little song that you can watch. Some parents might recognize this character from when they were kids ;)
Sentence Video

We played a game where we had the chance to create some crazy sentences that you could play at home. It's easy and can be done in just a couple minutes. All you need is some paper and at least two people. One person writes the subject, the other the predicate and then you reveal what you wrote. It's to come up with some crazy sentences.  After the sentence is revealed, take review why it is a full sentence and how you know it is a full sentence.

It was so nice to meet and talk with everyone last night at our Parent Night. I know not everyone could make it, so I have attached the Presentation below as a link. Please feel free to email me with any questions you may have. 

Parent Night Presentation

Today was a short day, but a productive one!  We have spent some time over the last few days talking about checking for understanding when we read.  As we read, we take random breaks and think about what we have read through summarizing, asking questions, and retelling. 

Here is a poster we have been using. Starting next week, each student will have these in bookmark version that students will keep with their book bins.  Feel free to print this out and use this at home as well during their home reading time. Don't limit checking for understanding to only these questions - make up your own!

What a wonderful day of learning today! The students were so excited about learning more about magnets!  We did a scientific experiment to answer our question: "What is attracted to a magnet?"
Not only did we discover the answer to this, but we started to discover that the magnetic field is strong enough to go through different materials. 
Here are the objects that we tested today. As a family, discuss which of these was attracted to the magnet and why was it attracted or not attracted?  

In math, we continued our investigation on 2D shapes with a focus on shapes in our environment and looking at everyday objects.Today we had two challenges:

1.   Create an object or scene using our pattern blocks. Below are a couple examples. What shapes do you see? Could you have made the same object with different pattern blocks? Why or why not?

 2. Create a picture/object using only squares and circles. I love the creativity with our pictures!  

We will soon be introducing the 3D shapes with a focus on recognizing these shapes all around us and using them to design our own Dream Playgounds for Ken Taylor School. 

Reminders

Early Dismissal tomorrow at 11:30!

It was exciting to our start science today. We talked about what scientists do and we realized that we are scientists in training! We will use the ideas in the picture beside this as a guide and go through each of these aspects in detail to learn about each part. Today we focused mostly on asking questions and talking about what good questions are.
Our question today was "What materials are attracted to a magnet?".
We made some predictions about what materials would be attracted to a magnet and which ones would not and why.  Tomorrow we will finish the experiment and will come up with some answers to our question!

In gym, we learned some new games that we could play outside during recess and we even talked about how to invent good games.  One game we played was Follow the Leader and we practiced moving in different ways (high, low, quick, slow, sideways, backwards etc).  We also learned a game called Traffic Lights that we could easily adapt for other areas of interest. Ask your child what the game was and brainstorm how he/she would change this game to make it his/her own.

Looking forward to seeing you tomorrow for the Parent Night!

Sept. 13

To kick off a new project, we spent some time thinking about shapes. We started math with an open ended problem: "I drew a shape that has 4 sides. Draw as many shapes as this could be." Here are a few of the shapes we came up with.



After, we read a book called "Shapes in the Kitchen" as a way to recognize shapes in our environment. We then took this idea of finding shapes in our space and explored our classroom to find as many different real life examples of 2D shapes such as triangles, rectangles, ovals, and squares.  The purpose of this activity was to try to recognize how shapes make up many of the objects in our environment.

Tonight with your family, explore your kitchen, bedroom, or any other space in your house to see if you can find different shapes. Questions to ask:

• How would this object change if we changed the shape?
• Why do you think they chose to use this shape?
• How many edges, corners?
• How does this triangle/square/rectangle differ from the last one we found?

If you have time, here is a fun game that helps students review the attributes of 2D shapes Shapes Game.

Reminders:

• Curriculum Night on Thursday 
• Envelopes due ASAP!! (Thank you)

Parent Night: Our Curriculum Night – on Thursday, September 15th is from 6:00 – 8:00 pm; this will be a great first opportunity for you to learn about some key things your child’s teacher wants you to know and will provide an opportunity for you to ask questions. There will two repeating presentations from each teacher and then time for you to ask questions afterwards. This time will facilitate the connections between home and school and better prepare us for the first conferences in early October. Please drop in to the appropriate sessions with your child’s teacher.

Happy Monday and welcome to our second week of school!


We had a great class meeting today about "Changing our Mindsets" and trying to use new vocabulary when we are stuck or feel frustrated with a task or activity. We are working to say "not yet" rather than "I can't".  As a class we came up with a few others such as "I can try again" or "I am almost there". With your family, share some of the other vocabulary we used and talk about why saying these phrases is better for our learning than "I can't".  Parents click here for a Ted Talks video about the Power of Yet and the research to support it.



We also did some writing today that you will see on our bulletin board when you come for our Curriculum Night on Thursday (See our September Newsletter for more information).  We are hoping our hints and our pictures will give you enough clues to find your child's work without any names!  Here is one example:

Check out the Educational Links section as some new links have been added. These are educational sites you could have your child go to when they have some spare time to say those dreaded words... "I'm bored!!" These will be updated regularly so be sure to check often.

One week already?!?!

Happy Friday to everyone!  We made it (with smiles!!!) through our first week of school. 

Today we started a mini project all about us... It is a bit of a surprise for you to see for our Curriculum Night next week so we don't want to give away too many details( hint: it includes some adorable drawings of us).

We are also well into Read to Self Independently as part of our Daily 5 literacy program. The students have been practicing picking good spots in the classroom to read in and increasing the stamina for independent reading time.  It's great to see students making such responsible choices about where they sit and what they read so early in the school year. Today we started learning about "IPICK" books.  See below to learn more about this as this is a good reference for both home and school when picking reading books.

We also finished our math game today and added in some basic bar graphing. For our activity, we first had to roll a die and place the corresponding number of blocks into a cup. When our cup was full, we needed to count the blocks, and sort them by colour. Lastyl, e made some bar graphs to represent how many blocks we had of each colour and reviewed the terms "most/least". 

Thank you to both the students and parents for making this such a wonderful first week of school for everyone. I can't express enough how happy and excited I am to be at Ken Taylor and to be the teacher of your children!  It has been such an exciting and energetic week and I look forward to many more together. Enjoy your weekend!

Reminders:
- Please send back envelopes as soon as possible
- Curriculum Night - Thursday Sept. 15 - 6:00 - 7:30
- early dismissal next Friday - Friday Sept. 16 @11:30

Our First Assembly!

Today we had our first assembly! Students gathered in the gym where we practiced how to sit responsibly. Please review the following expectations with your child:

Mrs. Buonomo lead our school in the singing of O' Canada. All assemblies will start with our anthem. To learn the words and practice singing it, please visit this link.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hmme5rHRzCs

During the assembly, we read the story The Three Questions. 

Please click the picture below to listen to the story with your child. 

We will be doing more work with this story over the rest of the year.

Reminder: Please send home forms from the white envelope sent home on the first day of school. Thanks!

I hope you all had a chance to check out our blog post from yesterday, if did not, you can see the post if you scroll down below today's post...

Today was another fun filled day of learning! We spent some time reflecting about our first day of school and finishing a letter that we wrote to our parents. This is in our backpack, so please take some time to read it together and talk about your new classroom and school.

A pattern with Ella's
 favourite colour!

Each box will be filled with
something that represents us

We also attempted our first entry into our visual journals. We learned about how visual journals allow us to use different ways to express our thoughts, feelings, and questions including writing, drawing, doodling, and even... creating our own comics! We can't wait to use these journals through the year to represent our learning.







We started some math today by playing a simple math game. This helped us practice counting and grouping tens. We will continue this game tomorrow and add some simple graphing into the activity.

Welcome to Grade 2!

Welcome to the blog for room 112 - Grade 2 at Ken Taylor School!

Here you will find daily updates of learning, events in the school, and important news. Please be sure to check each day so that you don't miss any of it!  (updates will be posted around 5:00 each day)

Our Classroom! We can't to fill up those empty spaces!

Our Reading Nook

It was so wonderful to meet all of the new students today! The excitement for back to school and Ken Taylor was felt through the classroom and school by students, teachers, and parents. Aren't we so lucky to have this beautiful new school to learn in?

Each morning, students will line up at the doors closest to our classroom by 8:00 (these are the doors on the compound). I will be there each morning to meet the class and bring them in. They will also be dismissed at this door so for the next few weeks we are asking parents to meet their children at our door if they are being picked up. 

Today we had a chance to meet, to get to know each other a little better, and to get to know ourselves a little better. We started to learn a little bit about our brain and how it can grow smarter and stronger just like the muscles in our body. We learned about neurons and connections and how to make these connections stronger. To learn more about it, please click this link. The Brain!

With your family, review some things that you feel are strong connections and some that are new for you. How do you think you will get your new connections to become stronger?

I think we would all agree it was a wonderful day today and left us all wanting more! I can't wait to see you all tomorrow :)