Thinking Questions: The First few days of Second Grade...

Breaking News...

There's lots of fun and learning going on in room 207. Our main focus in these first weeks of school are things like learning everyone's name, how to greet, where everything is located, appropriate times for various activities, expectations, etc. At the beginning of the year we go slow in order to go fast later.

Academic Highlight

In light of talking about expectations, we read the book, Little Blue Truck by Alice Schertle. It's a simple children's book with an expected theme that some might describe as, "Be nice." When I first came across this book a number of years ago, I was surprised at the deep discussions I could have with my classes about what it says about how people treat each other and what we would like to be true in our classroom.

Here's a picture of the sticky notes your kids made to indicate whom they would like to have as a classmate in our classroom (Little Blue Truck, Animals, or Big Yellow Truck).

Later, we discussed as a whole group how the characters treated each other. We talked about the evidence that someone was nice or not nice to another character. Here's a picture of how we summarized that information.

You can ask your child which character(s) they would like to have as a classmate. They may have changed their mind after our discussion.

On Friday afternoon I asked the kids how they might describe the first few days of second grade, here's what they said.

"Super fun, terrifyingly hard (the first day), different--when we go to recess, very confusing (getting use to everything), a lot of explaining, super easy, first day I was very shy--then I got use to it" (many "me too's" for this last one). Sometimes we forget how hard new situations can be, your kids are handling it well and are learning the second grade routines.

Here are some pictures of what kids were doing during our Friday Choice time.