Vaniman

Another Great Planting!

 
We had another successful planting again today and we couldn't have had a better weather day! Thank you to Mr. Clarke for volunteering to drive us there and planting a lot of plants! We planted 150 plants again. This time we had a pretty long hike to the planting site, so all of your children should be pretty worn out today. Please note that because of our planting trip, we did not get folders home today.

Thanks again for all of your great support. It is really fun to see how all of my students become great caretakers of our earth and plants. They had a great time and were sad it was the last time we will be planting with the park rangers.

Enjoy this beautiful weather!

Thank you!

Thank you for all of the wonderful Valentine gifts you gave me today! My heart was very warmed by all of the generosity and kindness. This was a very special Valentine's Day! I feel very loved! Thank you!!

This was great!

This week we were masters again. We taught 8 other classes on how to design a garden. They were responsible for showing them where to plant as well as give them ideas for how to design their garden. We learned a lot about being leaders and what the responsibilities are while we are leaders. We will be doing our final planting with the 8 other classes in April here on school campus.

This week we also did our first Readers Theater! This was so much fun! You will see their script coming home today. We were focusing on expression and fluency. We will be doing Readers Theater every few weeks in order to practice this skill. Ask your child to read their parts to you. They really enjoyed this!

Also a reminder about our next planting trip. This will be the last time we will meet with the park rangers on the trails. We will be leaving school at 11:00 and arrive at the Sope Creek Park soon after. This will be your last opportunity if you are wanting to chaperone a planting trip. Please let me know if you are interested.

I hope everyone has a wonderful weekend and enjoy this beautiful weather!

Writer's Workshop

Hi Vikings!

This has been a great week! Our 2nd graders performed very nicely Thursday night and did an amazing job remembering their lines and songs. They have been using the lifeskill of perseverance. They have been practicing daily, but have also been completing their other work. Way to go 2nd graders!

Next week we will be beginning something sort of new. We will officially begin Writer's Workshop. We have been doing our writing in more of a one on one setting. Writer's Workshop is going to give everyone an opportunity to write individually first and then editing, revising and publishing will be done with me. Monday we will begin the whole process. We talked about it today at Town Hall Meeting and everyone is excited about our new adventure.

Next week and the week after, I will be testing students on their sight words. If your child has reached their goal on sight word recognition, they will no longer have sight words coming home. This will give them more time in class to work on their writing. For those students who need to continue working on sight words, you will see their list come home and we will continue to focus on those as well as our writing.

On other news:

Ben's family has offered to take care of Humphrey over the February break. We still need someone to volunteer to take Max and Molly home. If you are interested in taking them home for the week, please let me know.

Next week, we will be teaching other students again. We will be showing them where their garden will be constructed and they will begin sketching what they want the garden to look like. My students will be guiding them in this process.

We also have another planting trip coming up on February 15th. If you are interested in chaperoning, please let me know. We would love to have you come!

I hope you all have a great weekend and hopefully we will have a little break in the rain soon!