50 Nifty United States Parade!

Hello Families-

It has been a fantastic week of learning here at RMCS. This week we celebrated our Social Studies unit on the United States of America by parading our floats around the school. Students worked tirelessly to find unique ways to present information about states using pictures, words, and creating models. The joy they exuded as they marched in front of the entire school, singing Fifty Nifty United States, was palpable. Check out these floats and our video:

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- How long is 1,000 links?
- Using photographs to write Haikus
- Finding the area of many different rectangles
- Answering the 5 W's and 1 H questions about our nonfiction books
- Monster Move it with Double Digit Addition

Have a wonderful break!
Kelly

And the Award for Best Book Goes to...

Hello Families-

We've had a fabulous week of learning here in Room 17. This week, we celebrated the end of one writing unit and the beginning of another! We closed our opinion unit of writing by holding a real-life red carpet event! During this event, students had the opportunity to read their book award nominations and even get a little fancy! Here is a peek into our award ceremony.

We have begun our new unit of writing on poetry! To begin this unit, we went on a nature hike, trying to gather inspiration from the world around us. We collected objects and then we used our poets eyes to see these objects in new ways: a rock became a slice of cake, a branch became a magic wand! Next week, we will look at the Haiku format and see if we can put our words into this structure.

This week in math, we have been learning about the value of 1,000, what it looks like and how we can most efficiently reach 1,000 while counting! The students were all eager to jump into their groups when counting different objects in our classroom including Unifix Cubes and Popsicle Sticks! They practiced counting, reading and writing the number 1,000. Here is a look into our counting!

State Fair!
Next Thursday at 2:00pm, we will be holding our state fair with a parade of our state floats. It will be during the school day, so we understand that many families will not be able to make this event. We will be posting many pictures and videos so that everyone can attend at least virtually :)

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Whole vs. Set Fractions
- Stopping at the end of sections of nonfiction to think about what that part is mostly about and finding the main idea
- Hurricanes by Gail Gibbons
- Mystery Doug- Who invented Pizza?
- K/1 Music show

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly

Sakura Cherry Blossoms

Hello Families-

It was wonderful getting to see you all at Parent-Teacher Conferences this past week. I appreciate you all coming and sharing in the joys, successes and goals of our school year.

This week, we made a cultural connection between Taiko Drumming and the beginning of our writing unit of poetry where we will be writing Haikus, a Japanese form of poetry. To continue our experience with this culture, we created some Japanese artwork- Sakura Cherry Blossom paintings. We are now hoping that Vermont will show some of it's own spring soon! Here is a peek at out work:

This week in math, we completed our unit on money. We are now able to identify coins, their values, and then solve addition and subtraction problems involving money. We learned 3 new math games to practice these skills including Beat You to $1.00, Close to 25 cents and 3 Spins to Win. Next week, we will begin a new unit of math: Place Value to 1,000. We began to immerse ourselves in this work by reading the book How Much, How Many, How Far, How Heavy, How Long, How Tall is 1,000?

Don't Forget!
- If you are able to volunteer your time this Wednesday, Thursday or Friday to help us paint our state projects, please complete and send in the blue form!
- We are still a few copy boxes short, if you come across any cardboard copy paper boxes that you are willing to donate to the 2nd grade, we would greatly appreciate it!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Rectangle Hunt
- Meeting with our writing editors and the Big Bosses
- Researching our states in texts and on the chrome books
- Clementine
- Monster Move it Math Subtraction

Have a wonderful week!
Kelly