2H Class Blog!: October 10th News

Happy Columbus Day Weekend!

Highlights from our week:

*Global Read Aloud (GRA): 2H is participating in The Global Read Aloud! Joining over 850,000 students worldwide, our Owl Class will be reading and studying author & illustrator Lauren Castillo. The Global Read Aloud project encourages classes to participate by reading the shared books and connecting with other students throughout the world! Our class connection is with the first grade students of Bermudian Springs Elementary School in York Springs, Pennsylvania! We had SO much fun "meeting" them this week and learning about their school and typical school day!

Our first Skype Meet-and-Greet with Miss K's first grade class!

An aerial view of SMS from Google Earth

Bermudian Springs Elementary School----is that a football field? We had a lot of questions for our Pennsylvania friends!

We spent the week emailing back and forth to learn about our new friends. We learned that they are working hard on creating a movie to show us what their school looks like and we can't wait to see it! Inspired by their work, we'll begin photographing some of the special spots of SMS to create our own video clip this week.

Our first book for the GRA was Nana in the City. As this was our first introduction to Lauren Castillo's work, we enjoyed trying out one of her illustration techniques: bold outlines.

*Words Their Way: We've completed our first unit in Words Their Way! Units run in two-week cycles. On the first day of the cycle, the sort is introduced. Students explore and analyze the words to discover patterns and consistencies and to establish rules. The first week of the unit is done completely in class to build independence. The second week of the cycle is when you will see the word sort come home (words did not come home for our first unit, but will be coming home in the future). Practice will now happen in both the classroom and at home and students will be given a "spelling review" on the spelling pattern on Friday. On these reviews, students will be given five words chosen randomly from their sort list, as well as three "challenge" words that were not on the sort list, but do follow the same pattern. The purpose for Friday's review is to determine if students have mastered the spelling pattern and are ready for a new pattern, or if they need some more time on the current pattern. I will share their spelling review booklets with you at parent conferences.
*Science: Science was pure magic this week! Using another Mystery Science as our guide, students set out to culminate our unit on magnets by exploring the question: "What can magnets do?" Boy, were they amazed!

Magnets work THROUGH other objects!

The paperclip chain held its magnetism after being pulled from the magnet!

A very successful science talk in which we shared our findings.

The FLOATING magnet!

Feeling the REPELLING force!

What a great unit to explore the magic of science! We'll begin our earth science unit next week!

*Writing: On Friday, we held our very first AUTHOR CELEBRATION! All of the Owls have been working on numerous pieces in writing workshop, so this week they selected one piece to polish up and "publish" for our celebration. Sharing their great writing boosted each writer's confidence as they absolutely loved receiving compliments and praise for all of their hard work! Nice work, writers!