Reminder- The students are to wear their uniforms to school.  They may bring their Halloween costumes.  They will be changing into their costumes after Mass and gym.

First grade has math homework tonight.

*We will not have a spelling list this week.

*Thursday the students may bring their costumes to change into after Mass.

*We will have our Halloween party on Thursday morning at 10:00.

*Our class won the Mind Marathon pizza party.  We will be having pizza on Thursday at 11:00.

*Thursday is an early dismissal - 11:30.

Second Grade Math

We have been spending a lot of time lately on ungrouping in subtraction.  This is the same system most of us learned in second grade except they called it regrouping or borrowing.  Student progress has been great, and though sometimes we forget a step, we are getting better.  You may notice that sometimes papers have two scores on them.  I believe that seatwork is a learning process, and I want the kids to correct their answers to find out where their mistakes are.  I like to have them make corrections in the room so I can give them immediate help.  I record their new scores with corrections made.  

In math facts, we have about 6 kids that are two levels away from starting multiplication. That's awesome.  We test facts every Thursday so if your child can not find their facts sheet, you can email me for a new one. I give the students 4 minutes, but they generally finish before then.  

Second Grade Phonics

Our focus right now is suffixes - es, ed, est, en, s, less, ment, ing, er, ish, able, ful, and ness.  Learning base words and adding suffixes is actually a good way to learn to spell correctly.   First we write our base word, and then we add our suffix. This is especially helpful in knowing if the suffix is s or es. We are also learning how to divide words into syllables.  These longer words can sometimes be intimidating for less confident readers, but when we isolate words into smaller parts,it helps to be able to able to decode them as well as spell them. 

Art Update - Grades 1 and 2 are doing an excellent job in STREAM working on the mosaic birdbaths. One is almost complete. In class we are working on our designs for other birdbaths. The kids have great ideas. The challenge for them is to transfer their idea and drawing into a tile design. They are doing a great job! I'm really proud of them.

Tomorrow is going to be a Spirit Dress Down Day.  The students may wear anything that has Res on it or our school colors - green and white.


Also - Today we read the story Scary Party by Sue Hendra.  Then we divided ourselves into the parts of the book and acted out the story.  Here's a cute picture!

After that we listened to some fun Halloween music!  I found out their favorites are The Monster Mash, Purple People Eater, and Ghostbusters.  :)

First grade has math homework tonight.

Tomorrow is the Diocesan Mass at the Resch Center.
Everyone needs to either bring a bag lunch or you indicated that  your child would have a lunch (turkey and cheese sandwich) from the hot lunch program.

The list of students that I have that is taking the lunch from the hot lunch program is Cullan, Ella, Katey, Landon, Misha, Madison, Gabriel, Monika, and Clara.

If your child is bringing a lunch, there are a few guidelines - All lunches must be in a consumable bag (brown bag lunch).  Everything that is in their lunch must be consumable - plastic silverware, baggies, etc.  We will not be bringing the lunches back with us to school...so no lunch boxes, tupperware, silverware, etc.  Also - no soda is allowed.  I'll put all of the lunches together in a bag and pass them out at lunch time.

Weekly Spelling Lists

First Grade - Phonetic List - Short o Words
box
fox
top
job
not
hop
trot
spot
chop
frog

First Grade - High Frequency List - Words 51-60
out
them
then
she
many
some
so
these
would
other

Second Grade - Phonetic List - Short u Words
just
hunt
club
drum
jump
dust
bump
until
ugly
sunny

Second Grade - High-Frequency List - Words 241-250
paper
hard
near
sentence
better
best
across
during
today
however



*Writer's Workshop -
Today I sent home a sheet of paper called an interest inventory.  Please fill this out at home and return it to school.  I will glue these sheets into the back of the writer's workshop notebooks.  This can help the students out when they can't think of what to write about.  :)