Weekly Update! October 4-8

Hello!
There is so much to write about from such a short week!

Here are the brief highlights:
* The children had their school photos taken on Tuesday.
* We took our first field trip of the year to the Arlington Heights Historical Museum and the Riviera Restaurant. What a beautiful day and full of fun learning experiences.
* The school participated in an extended fire drill on Thursday morning, supported by the Arlington Heights Fire Department.  During this drill, we not only practiced exiting the building safely and quietly, but we also found our spot on the field, south of the school, where we would remain in case there was a need to be out of the building for an extended period of time. The children did a nice job during this practice time. 
* Jack Musich came back to visit our class on Thursday afternoon as the children worked on their drawings of the Arlington Heights Landmark they are studying!
* The field trip permission slips for our next trip went home on Friday. We will be walking to the Police Department on November 2nd. There is no cost for this trip.
* Our book orders came in this week! The children were so excited to see their new books in their mailboxes on Friday. Its so much fun to see them so eager to READ!  Thank you for ordering!

Coming up:
* There is no school on Monday due to the Columbus Day holiday
* Andrea from the Riviera Restaurant will be visiting Dryden to talk to the children about owning a business in Arlington Heights on Wednesday morning.
* The Arlington Heights Book Mobile will visit the Dryden 2nd graders on Wednesday, October 20th. Make sure to send your child with their library card on that day so they can check out some materials they are interested in!

Spelling:
We worked this week on words that have the long and short /o/ sound. Next week will be a review week. The children will have the opportunity to choose their own spelling words! They will be encouraged to look through their own writing, "you try" sheet, and our current social studies vocabulary words to choose words that are relevant and important to them.

Grammar:
The children practiced identifying compound subjects and predicates. They went on to combine these sentences to eliminate repeated the subject or predicate in the sentence. We also practiced the proper use of quotation marks to show dialogue in a sentence.

Reading:
The common theme to our literacy activities this past week was "Coming to America." We kick off every theme building our background knowledge by talking about the topic. Our new oral vocabulary words included: custom, journey, liberty, greet, and varied. We talked a lot this week about immigrants and why they would choose to come to America. We also discussed the customs that they would bring that represent their culture. Our story of the week was entitled, "My Name is Yoon." It was about a little girl who moved here with her family from Korea. The comprehension strategy we focused on was making predictions, so we paused throughout the story to think about what might happen next.  The children met with their guided reading groups as well. Each group read from the genre of historical fiction.  We learned that historical fiction is a story created by the author that is based on a historical event or time period. The new vocabulary words we worked on this week in our reading included: cuddle, favorite, patient, practiced, settled, and wrinkled. We noticed that several of these words are verbs, or action words, that have inflected endings.  The children noticed the 'ed' at the end of these words, and recognized that these words happened in the past.

Next week is our review week in reading. The children will review key concepts and skills from the last 5 weeks, and take their unit assessment on Friday.

Math:
The children worked on fact families this week. This involved practice with fact triangles, and dominoes! We noticed that we could identify 2 addition and 2 subtraction facts for every fact family.  The children practiced writing subtraction story problems based on given fact families as well. These included number models and unit boxes.
  
Social Studies:

Our unit on Arlington Heights is in progress! The children really built up their background knowledge with our field trip on Wednesday. They learned about one of our first families, the Mullers, who lived at the corner of Fremont and Vail. We became familiar with what life was like back in the late 1800's as we  viewed the parlor, office, dining room, bedrooms and kitchen of one of the oldest homes in our town. We also learned that Mr. Muller owned a soda pop factory that began in his basement! We visited a replica of a log cabin that was similar to what the early settlers lived in on the prairie long ago. The children were excellent listeners, were interactive and asked very intelligent questions!

Back at school, we discussed the difference between "needs" and "wants."  The children learned that living creatures require food, clothing and shelter in order to survive. We brainstormed all kinds of other things that would be fun to have, that we could live without. We moved on to discuss the prairie and what it looked like before the settlers arrived. We visited a website called "Build a Prairie," in which the children were challenged to interactively choose appropriate mammals, grasses, insects, birds and reptiles that would live on the prairie. We watched the prairie we "built" grow right before our eyes! Next week we will discuss the first human inhabitants of our area, the Potowatomi Indians!

Thank you for reading! I hope you are enjoying the beautiful long weekend!