9/28-10/2

Hello,

It was great to see families for our first ever virtual family night! I helped plan this event and would love feedback on how it went or ways we can make it better in the future. Feel free to email me your thoughts!

Upcoming Events:

9/30: Picture Day (There will be a retake day for those that miss it)

Short Term Virtual Learning:
There may come a time when your child has been in close contact with someone in your family who has COVID, causing them to be out of school for a period of time. If this is the case I will work with you to get material for your student to work on during the time they are home. I will send home a Chromebook and Charger, along with material for reading, writing, and math.

We have been working to build in many opportunities for your student to engage in learning or collaboration through their chromebooks, to allow them to become as familiar with them as possible. The idea behind this is that they will need less help if they need to be home.

Reading:
We will be finishing our first unit in reading this week. So much fun...getting to know the characters in our books, thinking about the lessons we can learn from the books, and even grouping books together that are similar. It was also fun to start some small groups with students and to get to know them as readers.

We are going into a shorter unit that supports learning that students learned in 1st grade. It will be a review of different word solving strategies readers use to solve tricky words. We want 2nd graders to be INDEPENDENT , efficient word solvers. If your child is reading with you at home and appeals to you for the word, you could say, “What can you try? What else could you try? Does that make sense?”

Writing:
We will also end the first unit in writing by the end of the week. We have been working hard writing series books: taking the same character on many adventures. Students will make a series box and put all their books in them. Just like you see at a bookstore!

We aren’t able to celebrate the end of the unit like we usually do. We love to have an audience and often invite other classrooms to share in our hard work. So, when your child comes home with their series box you could make a celebration of it!! Make a special treat, gather around, and let them read their books to you.

Math:
In math we are working on odd and even numbers, determining if an equation is equal or not equal, and solving word problems that have an unknown. The unknown can be at the start, the change, or the end. Last week we talked about No Solve Math Days...this is when we work to identify what the story problem is asking us, set it up, and then don’t solve it! The students thought it was a little silly. It is helpful to get them to focus on what is being asked in the problem and not racing to answer it.

A few photos from last week, trying to get outside to read: