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Community Building

Community Building

The first two weeks of school we began building our classroom community through playing games to learn about each other, practicing new routines, and discussions about how to make our classroom a place where everyone can learn their best. We played “our favorites” game, where we learned each other’s favorite ice cream flavor, hobbies, and more. We played a team building game where in small groups students had an elastic with pieces of strings attached. The objective of the game was to stack cups using on the strings and elastic- no hands on the cups allowed! Following this activity we discussed how we needed to work together to build the cup tower and compromise, as well as listen to each other’s ideas.

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Ask your child what their groups’ strategy was to build the tower!

Reading

To start our year off we read a lot of wonderful books this week. We explored our classroom library and were detectives during a Library Scavenger Hunt. We worked with a buddy using clues to find different genres of books, or books that looked interesting that we never have read. We learned a lot about where to find different books in the library, and the correct way to take them out and put them back in the library.

We also began listening to stories with important lessons that can be applied to second grade. One book we read, What If Everybody Did That? By Ellen Javernick, describes how if one person breaks a rule, like littering, what would happen if everybody broke that rule. We then brainstormed classroom rules to help us accomplish our goals. We organized the rules into three categories: rules that have to do with the classroom, yourself, and others. We learned that as a community we need to work together to support and learn from each other, so that we can help each other accomplish our goals. All students had the opportunity to share rules that they felt would help our community be safe, respected, and positive. We even split up into groups and made skits to show the class how some of the rules should look. We discussed how having a rule that helps the classroom, each other, and ourselves would be the best way to support the second graders in having a successful and joyful year.

Talk to your child about a rule they think is important in both the classroom and their house!

Math

We got to know more about each other by a Math About Me activity, which helped us to see how math is around us everyday. Some of the things we learned about each other with using math and numbers were: our birthdays, how many teeth we have lost, addition and subtraction problems, and how many people are in our family. We discovered whose birthday will come first during the school year, and which months will have the most birthdays. We learned a little bit more about each other through our math project!

Take some time to talk at home about how your family uses math and numbers to help your family in everyday situations.

 

Yahadut: Tashlich

We learned about the ritual of Tashlich through reading the book Tashlich at Turtle Rock. We went on our own tashlich walk to the Gowanus Canal making several stops along the way. First we stopped to draw something good from the past year with chalk. Then we collected items from nature to represent the things we wanted to throw away. Lastly, we shared things we promised to try to do better in the coming year, as we shared apples and honey in Carroll Park.

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Art with Iviva:

Now that we’re in second grade, we are expanding on skills learned last year. We began making collages using leaves, bark, acorns and dried flowers. Next week, we will use our collages as printing plates, rolling ink on top to make prints on paper. This type of print is called a collagraph (a collage + print). We can’t wait!

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