100th Day and Valentine's Day

Dear Families,

Wow! This week was action packed with celebrations! We celebrated our 100th day of school with lots of Math and activities. To mention a few: we built a structure with 100 cups, we wrote "If I had $100....", we made a special 100th class "chex mix" with a total of 1,560 pieces of food in it! Yes, that's right. We counted together up to 1,560. Thanks to our expert 1st and 2nd grade Mathematicians!

                                          Working together to build their 100th day structure!

Then, we celebrated Valentine's Day together. Everyone was so excited to exchange their Valentine's with their classmates. Thank you so much for all the incredibly delicious treats! 

Coming up this week:

• Secure the building drill: We will practice this drill together first as a team and then school wide the next day. During this drill we will go to our designated safe space inside the building. This is to practice and assure students that they are safe at school.
• Red Clover Week at ABS: Students will read each Red Clover book nominee and then vote on their favorite!

Best,

Katie

Weekly Update

Dear Families,

Happy snow day to all! I hope everyone has a safe day and your children get outside to enjoy the snow!

Monday, February 11, 2013 is our 100^th day of school. This is a great opportunity to do fun hands-on activities to practice number sense and work with the number 100. If possible, have your child bring in a 100 small snack-like pieces of food to add to our class “chex-mix” for a snack option.  Please, use peanut-free foods. Any type of cereal, goldfish or small snack type item could work. Be careful to wash hands when counting your 100 pieces with your child. We will combine everything to create our class hundreds “chex mix.”   Also, I sent a class list home in your child's Thursday folder for Valentine's Day. We will have a class celebration on Thursday for Valentine's Day at the end of the day after recess at 1:45pm.  Treats to share are welcome! 

In writing, we've made a lot of process researching our Vermont animals. Students are working hard to take the information they read and learn about their animal and write notes in their own words. This is a tough, but very important skill. We also had a Skype meeting with a real, professional writer and editor! We Skyped with Mike Rogge.  He is the Managing Editor for Powder Magazine. We learned what it is like to be a professional writer/editor and got to ask him lots of questions! We will be writing Mike letters to thank him and share our writing with him.  Ask your students about our meeting with Mike. Here's a photo below.

We read together The Champlain Monster by Jeff Danziger. This was a longer story that we started last week and finished this week. We were able to work on our reading comprehension skills, make predictions and infer meaning from the text together. Our class loved this story! Ask your child to tell you about the characters Eddie, Tracey and Pete.  What happened to Tracey?  Do you believe in the Champlain Monster?

Thank you!

Katie

K9, Four Winds and VT Animals

Dear Families,

Another exciting week together! We had a school-wide celebration on Thursday to celebrate our wonderful students at ABS. Our school filled up our school beehive with warm buzzies! That takes a lot of kind, safe and responsible behavior. :)  We had State Troopers visit our school with Trooper LaClair's K9 named Casko.  Students learned about how police officers and K9 keep us safe and watched a demonstration.  After, students were allowed to pet Casko.  Here are two pictures below.

Our class had a wonderful trip to WCS to watch the 3rd/4th grade Chorus concert! The 2nd graders in our class were excited to see some of their classmates from last year.  Many of your children shared that they would be interested in joining chorus once they are in 3rd grade!  

We started researching our Vermont animals this week. Each student chose their own Vermont animal to research and write their own All About book on that animal. We learned how to "re-voice" information we learn from authors and write that information in our own words. This is a skill we will keep practicing throughout this unit.  Check out our WallWisher. Students shared what animal they are researching and something they wonder about their animal.  This was our first time using WallWisher. Everyone really enjoyed it.  Free free to add comments or questions simply by double clicking on the "sky" and a box will pop up to add a comment! It's a fun way to share information. 

Thank you to Kathy (Keegan's Mom) and Kelley (Peyton's Mom) for coming in and teaching a wonderful Four Winds lesson about Vermont animals and plants in the winter.  We learned what different animals do to survive during our long, cold Vermont winters. Animals are either active, migrate, hibernate or dormant during the winter.  

Sincerely,

Katie