First Day of Class Blogger!

From Emily:
I earned two pieces of my rainbow.

From Mrs. Clough:
Happy Monday!  Welcome back to Mrs. Clough's 2nd Grade Happenings!  We began our first full week of school today and we also began building our rainbows!

So far the kids are off to a great start.  Everyone earned at least one piece to their good behavior rainbow!  I have stated to the kids that they may earn 1-2 pieces a day.  They know the reward coupons they may earn and they also have been taught the expectations they are expected to follow (our classroom agreements from a couple of posts earlier).  In addition, we have discussed reasons why I would ask a child to take off a piece of their rainbow (poor choices, breaking an agreement) though they have the chance to earn it back later in the day.  They also know that if everyone can build their rainbow in a week, we will have some type of class celebration!  They all seemed very excited about building rainbows and I hope that this excitement and engagement continues!  Please be sure to ask your child how their rainbow is doing and if they earned any pieces today (and every day)!  It's truly up to the good choices and exceptional behaviors they exhibit.  As you can see, Emily was excited to earn two pieces of her rainbow today!

We worked on many things today including taking the 2nd grade math assessment (which was 40 minutes long and many of the kids felt discouraged, I'm afraid.  Please reassure your child that this was a way for me to gauge where they are at and what I need to do as their teacher to help them achieve the skills necessary to prepare them for 3rd grade.  Our saying today was "If you don't know, try your best, and give it a guess!" :)

One other activity I would like to share with you is about our friend George.

I read the book Enemy Pie by Derek Munson.  It is about a boy who's summer was off to a great start until Jeremy Runson moves to the neighborhood.  Jeremy is not nice to the main character and calls him names.  With the help of his dad, the main character in the story learns a great recipe for turning an enemy into a friend. After reading story, I introduced the kids to my friend George (thank you Mrs. Tank for creating George!), and said that we were going to pretend to be enemies and say not so nice things about George.  I started off by saying I think his hair is silly looking and I began to crumple/wrinkle him.  Every child passed George around saying a negative comment.  Afterwards we discussed how George must feel and if it was okay to say those things about him.  We then gave George compliments and tried to flatten him out.  We noticed that he is still wrinkly and this opened the door to talk about how even if you apologize and say nice things, your friend (or enemy) still hurts inside so to be kind and use nice words to everyone, always.  We will continue to refer to George for the rest of the year and I even hung him up on our white board. :)

We began the early organization and idea compiling stages of creating our own autobiographies creating webs of our likes and dislikes.  This will be a project that continues over the next week or so.  Check back for more on that!

As a reminder-if your child plans on decorating and personalizing their composition notebook, please send the photographs, stickers, or cutouts from magazines with them tomorrow.  Also, book orders (if you choose to order books) are due this Friday, August 31!  Finally, it is still warm in our building!  Please make sure your child dresses cooly and has a water bottle to stay hydrated!  Hopefully some cooler weather will move in soon!

Check back tomorrow to hear from another student and myself!

Mrs. Clough