Student Council Elections and Recycling!

Patriotism was in the air this week at CJDS as we held our student council elections! Many of our own second graders gave fabulous speeches about the ways they’d like to make our school a better place. I was so impressed with how brave the students were to get up in front of the whole class! Congratulations to Eli and Evan for being our two nominees for class representative. We will vote on president, vice president, and class representative this Tuesday. Here are the students who ran for class representative!

On Friday, we took a trip to Charlotte’s Recycling Center. We heard a great presentation from Mrs. Paula at the center, which included a puppet show and live video feed from the recycling center floor. We took a tour of the plant and got to see where the materials are sorted, crushed, and shipped to other plants. We also learned about all the different things you can recycle in Charlotte, like cardboard! Did you know you can recycle cardboard?! The students were very respectful and asked Mrs. Paula wonderful questions. We also got to see the Knight’s baseball stadium and the Panther’s stadium on our trip home! A big thank you goes out to Mrs. Gamblin, for planning this trip as part of the students’ Project Based Learning class!

Reading
This week we began our fifth reading lesson, which covers the story Teacher’s Pet. The students worked on visualizing the text as they read. This is a very important reading strategy, because reading research shows that children who picture what they read in their heads will comprehend the text better. Think how boring it would be to read stories and not see a “mental movie” of the book in your head! A large part of our week was also spent working on our goals for our writing portfolios, so we will continue with this reading lesson and the same vocabulary words next week.

Kidblog
Last week was the students’ first time posting a reading response onto the Kidblog website. Once the students get into the ritual of using this website it will become easy for them to use. I going to provide more practice with this site during our literacy centers next week. I have the set the website to send the students’ responses to me before they get posted, so when your child hits “Submit for review” their response will not be posted until after I see it. Thank you for your help at home!

Writing
The students planned, drafted, revised, and began publishing their personal narrative stories this week. The stories are focused on small moments in the students’ lives and they have done a wonderful job filling them up with sensory details! I am so impressed with the creative ways the students wrote about topics like riding on the subway in New York, visiting Great Wolf Lodge, seeing a snake, getting a flu shot, and more! These stories will be up on our hallway bulletin board next week.

Spelling
We have completed our lesson on words with the long and short “u” sounds. Now that we have studied how to spell words with the all of the long and short vowel sounds, the expectation is that students should spell words with this pattern correctly in their writing, like their nightly reading responses. Next week, we will have a mixed review of words with these patterns.

Math
We are wrapping up Unit 3 on place value, money, and time. Our next unit will cover more material on addition and subtraction. Unit four will include work on number stories, temperature changes, estimating costs, and paper pencil strategies for adding two and three digit numbers.

I look forward to seeing everyone tomorrow! 🙂