Weekly News 5-31-24

 Weekly News for 2-P 5-31-24

6/1 - Run Club Fun Run; 9:00 am

6/12 - Field Day!

6/14 - K-7 Step Up Day

6/17 - Last Day of School for WCS K-8 Students (Dismissal at Noon)

*We had so much fun at the Decades Day school dance - check out the blog for some pics!

*This week in math we continued to review integral skills: partial sums algorithm, trade first subtraction, math facts, time/money and problem solving. Students are completing the IXL “snapshot” assessment, which helps give an overview of their skills and goals in both reading and math. This will be helpful information for 3rd grade teachers and is a great way for students to work on skills at their level.

*I am doing year-end reading assessments with students who hadn’t already met the benchmark - it is amazing to see so much growth! We are also completing year-end phonics/spelling assessments.

*Our literacy and science time this week was spent completing our loon research. We recorded what we learned about loons on our graphic organizers (beaks, feet, habitat, feathers, diet, size and special features.) This time our project was a poster and students created nonfiction “cutaways,” with facts and quality illustrations. We added a big loon drawing to our poster. Second graders are proud of their high quality projects. They are pulling so many big skills together in these projects. Next up is our last one - an individual bird research project! Students chose and researched a bird of their choice. They wrote a report from their notes, and next week will practice drawing realistic pictures of their bird and will learn to type their own report in Google Docs. I will turn these into bookmarks. You will be amazed by all their projects. We are fortunate to have the tools to do research online (Pebble Go) and with many nonfiction books from Ms. Luchies.

*Our phonics focus was special word endings (-ture, -sion, -tion and also how -er, -ist, and -or can turn verbs into nouns such as painter, artist, sculptor). As these words are getting harder we are incorporating more practice spelling them and using them in sentences with accuracy in meaning.

Art creations with Mrs. Devin

Working on loon cutaways

Laying out the loon poster

Cutting out the fact strips for the loon poster

The layout and design was an important step

Models can be very helpful!

So much hard work!

Sample poster - wow!

Proud researcher

Chewonki came on Thursday

Tyler showed us the silent feather adaptation of a great horned owl.

He had boxes that showed the size of all Maine owls.

We cupped our ears to amplify our hearing.

Checking out real talons

We tried to hear like an owl.

Owl skull

Ozzy!

Exploring the artifacts

Bird research on Pebble Go (kid-based research tool)

Who could resist this photo op??? Not Mrs. Pols!

Dancing twins!

Epic WCS Dance Party

Grooving!

Blurry photos - dancing away!

You have to dance with your kindergarten sisters!

Second graders are great big sisters!

A little conga line......

Mrs. Pols and Mrs. Vise had to have a short dancing break.

These kids had some moves!

Catching up with our osprey friends in Minnesota!

More magical loon posters