Happy New Year!!

We've had a busy start to the new year in Room 9! 

We started last Monday morning with Brad from the Puppet Showplace Theater in Brookline.  The kids LOVED making puppets with him!  Today Brad came back and the kids made their puppets come alive!  Their puppets will be sent home soon.

Thank you for your support and help with practicing spelling words at home.  I am so happy with the check-in that we did on Friday!  Everyone did great!!  At the end of the month, we will share our data from this new way of teaching spelling with the other teachers at Thompson.  It's really showing a great improvement  in children by individualizing work to their level.

The kids are sharing their published stories to the class.  It's such a nice time when the kids are able to share their work and hear compliments from other students.  We will start up with Writer's Workshop tomorrow.  The students will begin a new story organizer on a new topic from their homework sheet.

Each child picked a New Year's Resolution to work on at school in 2011.  What thoughtful and accurate ideas our students came up with.  We have some ambitious goals to work on! Look for the second grade bulletin board coming soon.....

In Math, we started a unit on time, timelines, and patterns.  We are working on further looking at the calendar, fact families, and math facts. Today Ms. Ferola read Ms. Rumphius and tomorrow we will create a timeline of her life.  Next week, we will organize a timeline of Martin Luther King's life. 
Thank you for all of the work that you did to help your child fill out the homework sheet last week.  They will pick the most important events to them and then create a timeline of these events.  I can't wait to see the finished products!

I would love to begin to include photos in our blog!  I sent home a note today (on peach paper) in your child's folder asking if you give/do not give permission of photos of your child on our blog.  Please send it back as soon as possible.

I will send out an email tomorrow letting you know about the status of our field trip.... It's looking like it's going to be postponed :(

Happy New Year!
    Nicole