Welcome Back

We hope that everyone had a relaxing and fun summer!  The students have jumped back into our school routine quite well.

This week we have been focusing on creating our classroom community.  We have been talking a lot about kindness and respect, and how we treat each other as well as the materials in our classroom.  We did different icebreakers to get to know our new class.

The students have had a chance to attend music and gym this week, and they are enjoying it so far!  In gym we are learning to recognize and be aware of the uses and limitations of our space, and to think about the other people that might be in our space as well.  We are experimenting with different movements and actions as we travel through the gym.  We also got a lesson on playground rules.  Ask your child if they remember the rules!  In music we have been reviewing some of our school songs, and getting to know our temporary music teacher, Mr. Cooper.  He will be with us for only a few weeks, as Mrs. McBride will be returning from maternity leave.

We have done a few writing tasks to warm up our brains and get us ready for some grade 2 learning.  We have written about our summer vacation, and the adventures we had, as well as a little bit of an introduction about ourselves.

We began learning about the calming art of Zen Tangle.  Although it is the first time that some students have tried this kind of art, they all did amazing!  It definitely takes patience to do Zen Tangling, and so we will be practicing throughout the year.

We began to build our stamina around reading to self this week.  It is important for the students to be able to read to self, and this year we will be moving to reading in our heads without having to say the words out loud.  Students will be practicing reading to self at school, and should also be practicing reading to self or to an adult for 10-20 minutes every day at home.

Today at the end of the day the whole grade 2 team (7 classes) got together out on the field to have some time for all the grade 2's to interact, and for the teachers to get to know some of the students from other classes!  It was so much fun!  There was freeze dance, soccer, and parachute games.  The grade 2 team is hoping to do this multiple times over the year.

In math we have begun to look at the calendar and start recognizing today, yesterday, and tomorrow.  We have been practicing our subatizing skills, and using mental math strategies to recognize how many in a group.  We learned a new math game called Addition Battle, where both players flip over a card at the same time and whoever adds them fastest (and correctly) gets to keep the cards.  This is a great game to play at home to practice addition skills to 10+10.

Next week we will be working on goal setting and getting the guided reading groups organized.  In math we will move into looking at patterning, and working on problem solving skills.  For inquiry, we will be starting our investigation of small crawling and flying animals.