Another Great Week!

Dear Families,

Thank you to those who were able to attend our Curriculum Night!

We'll send a separate email with an attachment so that you can look it over if you weren't able to attend. 

Important dates:

* Next week:  NWEA testing: Baseline data, no worries, just seeing where they're starting the year!

*September 19th: Online Book order due.

*September 29th: Picture day, Information and packets were sent home earlier this week.

*September 29th: DF Bingo Night: 6:00-8:00 p.m.

*October 14th: Fun Run, more information to come!

This week, we continued to review classroom routines and expectations. We had our first LEAD meeting with the second grade team and learned about appropriate assembly behavior. Students learned about our new school wide hand signal for attention. Ask your child to show you. We’re looking forward to some great assemblies this year and want to make sure that everyone can enjoy them with our leader like behaviors.

Language Arts:

This week we focused on our Reading Workshop/Learning shop Procedures.  Read to Self is a quiet time where readers get to read! Thanks to our volunteers who filled our Leveled book library! We also took our Words Their Way spelling pattern test. This test helps to determine letter patterns that children already know and those that they need to practice (short vowel patterns, long vowel patterns, etc.) Next week we’ll start our Writers’ Workshop and begin to find ideas for our personal narratives.

Math: In math, we reviewed our routine for math workshop. Students know routines of math and writing, game time, and math to self. They took a beginning of the year math test so that we could see skills that they remembered from first grade and skills they need to review. We began working in our math journals and had fun playing  the Number Line Squeeze Game and learned “Partner Principles.” Ask your child about them.

Science:  Worms! We did a thinking routine called, See, Think , Wonder. Students shared their thinking in teams and observed our Night Crawlers very closely. They used magnifying glasses to observe and write down what they saw. Then scientists  wrote  what they knew already about worms. Finally, what they wondered. Then they read an article and learned how to highlight important vocabulary words and learned the definition from the words around the word and answered comprehension questions. Ask your child how to tell the head from the tail! 

                                                                            My Favorite...

 

 

 

Effort and the power of Yet!  We mentioned at Curriculum Night about the importance of the power of yet! We are discussing with our classes about how some things may be hard for us now, and we may not be able to do them…yet. With perseverance and effort , soon these tasks will be easy for us. The effort part is important… we’re asking them, “How hard did you try?” Ask your child about their effort this week!

Character Trait of the Month! Empathy

We talked to you about our special projects at Curriculum Night. Attached to the email you will find some empathy papers to look over.  Your child’s Empathy Menu was sent home today. We’ll be talking and reading about this trait in class and sharing some of the things that they did to practice empathy.

One more thing…we need paper towel tubes for our number scrolls!

Have a wonderful weekend! Enjoy the weather and your children!