Dear Second Grade Parents,
Please email me by February 27th with three Great Person presentation times that would work for your second grader. Parents are invited to be a part of our audience. We hope you can come.
Monday 5th & 12th – 8:30 9:00 10:00
Tuesday 6th & 13th- 8:30 9:00 10:00
Wednesday 7th & 14th- 8:30 9:00 10:00
Thursday 8th & 15th- 9:00 10:00
Friday 9th & 16th- 8:30 9:00 10:00
Mark your calendars: Great Person Hall of Fame will be the morning of March 22nd.
Senora Boyce visited our classrroom and gave us our first Spanish lesson today. We will enjoy learning Spanish throughout the next few months. We are so grateful for her ability to challenge us with learning a new language. Thank you Senora Boyce for sharing your gifts and talents with us!
We wanted to thank our wonderful dads for coming to and working at our Valentine’s Breakfast. It was a very exciting day for the kids and a special memory of spending time with dads, grandpas, and friends. Thanks to all of our families that contributed items for our celebration. We especially want to express our appreciation to Ellen for organizing the details of our party and making sure everything went well.
To My Dear Second Grade Students,
Thank you for your beautiful cards, candy, and gifts for Valentine’s Day. You know how to fill my heart with joy and laughter! I love and appreciate you all very much.
Ms. Dargen
Dear Second Grade Parents,
Just a reminder that our online conference sign-ups are up and running. Please go to our blog and click on “Parents” and Conference Sign-ups to get to the link. If you need help, just email me and I’d be happy to assist you.
Ben Franklin
We are selecting a person this week for our Great People in History project that we will be working on over the next 5 weeks. The project should be completed and presented during the weeks of March 5th-March 21st. We will be checking in with each other each week to see how the project is going.
Project based learning is a great way for us to take charge of our own learning and get excited about putting together all the pieces. We will be reading both at home and in class and sharing our findings with each along the way. In class we will be practicing finding images to use for our project.
So far we have heard the stories of Martin Luther King Jr., Ben Franklin, Marie Curie, Thomas Edison, The Wright Brothers, Leonardo daVinci, Helen Keller, The Wright Brothers, Alexander Graham Bell, Christopher Columbus and Louis Pasteur. With each story we have noticed common characteristics that have helped this people be successful in their lives. Their accomplishments have affected the lives of so many people and have made a big difference in our world.
Marie Curie
We have gathered a list of the character strengths we observed in our study of these people: determination and perseverance, compassion and courage, curiosity and creativity, respect and responsibility, honesty and integrity. We have begun to see that great people often have these traits in common, even though they lived in different places and in different times.
Thomas Edison
We also celebrate this unit with our Second Grade Hall of Great People on Thursday, March 22nd. All of the second graders meet in the MPR from 8:30 – 9:30 to showcase their great people. This will be like a walking museum for the entire school to experience a taste of the great research you have done. Parents are invited to join us as well.
We are hoping to learn from the stories from these great people, so one day we, too, might become great people! Yay for reading biographies! Yay for studying history!
Thank you for helping your second grader with the memorization of their partner poem at home. Most of the kids have their poetry almost memorized! We have had a lot of fun working with our partners at school. I am very proud of the kids and their hard work and great attitudes. We are excited to perform our songs and poetry for our families. We are looking forward to seeing you at our Evening of Poetry and Song at 6:30 on January 26th.
Our Valentine’s Day Breakfast is on Tuesday, February 14th, from 7:50-9:00 am. We want to invite our dads (grandfathers, uncles, or friends can step in to be “dad” if you can’t make it) to help us celebrate this special day. Dads will be serving breakfast and our wonderful party moms will take care of the food details. Let’s enjoy some waffles with strawberries and whipped cream, milk and juice together. We’ll enjoy a little Valentine game and story after the breakfast! A class list of sweethearts will be coming home soon so kids can make their valentines. Dad’s, you may sign up via an email or sign up on the sign up sheet.
This week we celebrate the life of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We will look at the idea of beauty in diversity and the power of our words. Dr. King’s message was about the importance and the beauty of diversity in our world. His words remind us to look at a person on the inside. He encourages us to judge a friend based on their character and not by how they look on the outside. He reminds us to look at the things we have in common: a belief in the good in all people, a hope for a bright future and a love for all.
His words also inspire us to work hard to bring about positive changes in the world through peaceful ways through our words. Words can make people happy, they express our feelings, they can change lives and they can inspire us. However, words also have the power to make people sad and to hurt feelings. We will invite Ms. Barbour to talk about the power of our thoughts and our words in helping us to have a positive attitude in our daily life.
We also talked about friendships and how to be a good friend. We have talked about how each of us is unique and special. We have different tastes, different interests and different opinions. We are learning to see the good in others and compliment them. We are learning how to discuss our differences in a calm way. We are learning to listen well and respectfully to each other so we can expand our friendships. We are learning to admit mistakes to our friends and say, “I’m sorry” when we have hurt their feelings. We are learning strategies to help us stop unkind actions.
These are not easy goals, but Stafford is a place where students are kind and caring and they work on their friendship skills. Let’s commit ourselves to these goals in the new year. It’s a beautiful world and we have the power both to see this beauty around us each day and to help create it.
What is winter? Snowflakes in the air, and hot cocao by a warm fire. Whatever our thoughts and feelings around winter, we are excited for its annual arrival. We will be writing some winter poetry, experimenting with free verse and writing a winter haiku.
We are looking forward to presenting what we know about poetry at our Evening of Poetry and Song, Thursday, January 26th from 6:30-8:00. We will be singing songs and reciting poetry for our families. It will be a great night where we celebrate both our reading skills and our second grade community. It is a night to invite our parents, dress in our finest, and celebrate!
