Thank You!

I would like to thank everyone who attended conferences this week.  With it being our first year for student-led conferences, I was very impressed at how well the kids did presenting the material and information to you.  It's really special to see them taking ownership in their work and behavior!  It was really great to hear so many positive comments from parents as well.  We are curious to hear your thoughts, too, so if you could just jot me a quick note with any comments (positive or negative), it would be much appreciated.

We wrapped up with The Great Ball Game this week.  As I said before, this is a really unique story and the kids really seemed to like it.  We were focusing on plot again, with an emphasis on telling about the beginning, middle, and end of the story.  High frequency words were ago, accept, half, fair, though, and clear.  Robust vocabulary words were feud, superior, refuse, and insult.  Our grammar focus was proper nouns.  While we did a great job identifying the differences between common and proper nouns, it was easier for the kids to be able to tell whether a given noun was common or proper than to give examples.   But no worries because we'll be talking about them again next week.  Lastly, we wrote stories about what we would do if we were President.  The stories were displayed in the hallway during conferences, so hopefully you got a chance to read some of them.  They were good!

Next week we will read Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type.  I absolutely love this story, and so will the kids.  In fact, many of them have probably read it before.  We will continue to focus on plot - characters, setting, beginning, middle, and end.  High frequency words will be impossible, quite, understand, believe, brought, early, and enough.  Robust vocabulary words are request, negotiate, compromise, and improve.  If you are working on these words with your second grader at home, emphasize the difference between negotiate and compromise - these have proven to be confusing in the past.  However, these seem to be words that are really easy to use in casual conversation at home, so try to use them as much as possible over the course of the next week.  Our grammar skill will be proper nouns again.  We will focus more on abstract proper nouns such as days of the week, months of the year, and holidays.  Often the students don't think of these as nouns because they can't be touched (which is what our noun chant says makes a noun).  Go on a proper noun scavenger hunt with your child - look for them on signs when driving, in books, around the house, and even on TV!  Spelling words for next week have the long o sound spelled -oa and -ow.  Words are:
boat, snow, coat, grow, float, own, low, load, soak, bowl, also, around, form, three, small

Our specials schedule for next week will be:
Monday - computer
Tuesday - art
Wednesday - music
Thursday - gym
Friday - library

* We will be needing about 40 drink carriers for a project we will be doing around Christmas, so if you get one from a fast food restaurant or think of asking for one when you are there, please send them in.

Have a great weekend!