Reading Nonfiction, Reading the World

Hello Families-

It has been a wonderful week of learning here at Rick Marcotte Central School!  This week, we began a new reading unit on nonfiction. To begin this unit, we learned that nonfiction readers notice details in their texts and put all of these details together to grow some understanding. Then, readers ask questions that they want to further explore. Now, we didn't start our unit with any old text, we started by reading nonfiction texts of all kinds, including maps, models, posters, skeletons and big books. Here is a peek at our first week of learning:

This week in writing, students switched their roles from authors to editors. We have chosen one piece to fancy up and publish. Students worked with their editing peer to give and get thoughtful feedback on how to make their writing even stronger and more clear. Here we are working with our partners:

A Note from Mrs. Wheeler:
Our school counselors, Carol Wheeler and Meaghan Rice are hosting a number of parent coffees this year. They will be here at school on Tuesday mornings, 8:05-8:45, and we hope you will join us for the first one, scheduled for November 6th . As parents, you play the primary role in promoting healthy relationships and preventing child abuse, and it serves our children well when the adults use similar vocabulary and approaches. There will be a short presentation by Lori Howe from Prevent Child Abuse Vermont about the contents of the Healthy Relationships Project we teach at RMCS. We’ll also have time for conversation to help us plan the contents of future get together's. Young children are welcome, as this is very informal and relaxed time to learn together. Special take home bonus: there will be a free mindfulness tool for your family to add to your home peace corner.

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Rolling for minutes
- Knights in Shining Armor
- Pathways to 100
- Teacher station during math menu
- The Kingdom of Wrenly
- Adding 10 to any number on a number chart

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly

Reflective Math Thinking

Hello Families-

We've had a short but productive week here at Rick Marcotte Central School! This week in math, we completed our first unit on facts to sums of 20. We looked at put together problems, comparing problems, take apart problems and how many more/fewer problems. After the assessment, students were given their post assessments back with a yellow circle around problems that had a mistake. We celebrated these mistakes, as of course, they help us learn, and then used our growth mindsets to try to solve them again. What a helpful way for students to see how they did on their assessments while also giving them an opportunity to fix up and continue to practice their math skills.

This week in reading we played guess the covered word with partners. We used our three cueing systems (visual, syntax and meaning) to figure out what our partner's words were. This helped us bulk up these skills while having a blast!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Crafternoon
- Our writing growth chart
- Break Tens facts
- The Bandaid Lesson

Have a wonderful long weekend!
Kelly

Fun Run Extravaganza

Hello Families-

What a week of excitement we had here at RMCS! This week included Farm to School, the Fun Run,  and celebrations including our first reading celerbation, PJ day, silly sock day, and making slime. Wow! Along of with all of this fun, we still worked hard and learned a lot. This week in reading, we focused on author's intentions of teaching lessons to readers. We realized that many books have similar lessons, and that the author sometimes will have parts of a book come back again and again to have the whole book click together. To celebrate our first unit of reading, we did a "cheers" to reading and colored in bookmarks that remind us of word solving strategies.

Our Farm to School lesson this month was about bees. We learned that there is a serious bee crisis happening in the world, and especially in Vermont, with a loss of 53% of Vermont's bee population. We talked about how pollinators help us grow food and see beautiful flowers. Then we did a "blind" taste test of two different types of apples drizzled in honey. Here we are enjoying our apples.

We had a blast at the Fun Run! Thanks to all that helped make this happen. Here's our race day faces.

Finally, we celebrated our class's earning of Marky Marks by making slime. It was a huge success! If you'd like to make some at home, click here for the recipe. Here's our slimey day.

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- How many minutes in one hour?
- Mercy Watson to the Rescue
- Fire Safety Posters
- Using chromebooks during menu time
- Writing bit by bit

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly

We are Scientists!

Hello Families-

It was lovely to see so many families at open house and at our assembly this week. Thank you so much for your support!

It has been a fabulous week of hands on learning here in room 17. We started our week with a science experiment using color changing beads.We were presented with some plain old white beads and had to come up with experiments that might make them change color. We tried running them under hot and cold water and putting them in the dark before we discovered their secret. Ask your child how we turned our white beads into multicolored beads!

This week, Mrs. McCarthy also began teaching her science unit on Matter. We learned that matter is all around us and can come in three states: solid, liquid and gas. We know that matter has many different properties and got to explore a few different solids and liquids. Here we are making models of a ice cream experiment we watched.

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Learning fact strategy types
- Sorting our facts
- Looking at author's intention in books- authors try and make us have big feelings (happy, sad, laughter)
- Our second week of word study
- Those Darn Squirrels 
- The second grade assembly

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly