Weekly Update for 9/19

Hi Families!
I hope you have been enjoying the beautiful weather this weekend. It was a busy week! Students survived their first 5 day week of school last week. I had the pleasure of meeting many of you at Curriculum Night --thank you for coming! Our schedule was swapped and we had picture day. This week should be a little more mellow.

Important Dates this Week
Nothing out of the ordinary will be going on in our classroom this week!

Weekly Barrows Newsletter
​Here is the link to the latest Starburst from Principal Gallegos.

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Here's what's been going on in our grade 2 classroom:

Community Building
We continue establishing routines and expectations around how we function in our shared space. Our Morning Meetings continue to help us warm up for the day and learn about one another. 

This week I finally hope to have students generate their own classroom rules. I think it's important that students have a say in how we operate in our classroom and what the expectations are. We'll be reviewing our Barrows Belief of showing respect and learn more about what it means to persevere and collaborate this and next week.

Literacy 
Last week I read 7 chapters aloud from There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom by Louis Sachar, a favorite book of mine. Ask your child to tell you what it's about to check their comprehension! Students enjoy following Bradley Chalkers, a troubled 5th grade student who has pretty much given up on caring about school or making friends --until he meets the new student, Jeff, and starts to see the new school counselor, Carla. Students enjoy discussing the story, inferring, and analyzing the character motivations.   

Other Literacy highlights:

• Students wrote about their Hopes and Goals for 2nd grade. We'll revisit this writing again in January and June to revise and assess our progress.
• I read aloud Spaghetti in a Hot Dog Bun by Maria Dismondy which told the story of a girl who was picked on by a boy at school, but chose kindness to disarm him and change his perspective. 
• Students performed a song from their Fluency Packets, reading it aloud to either the class (I played guitar in the background) or privately to just me.

This week, students get a new Fluency Packet (3 nursery rhymes). We'll continue establishing our literacy block structure (read aloud, discussion, skills, independent practice) with more read alouds and skills practice (in decoding, vocabulary, or literary analysis). We'll also start writing complex sentences about our read alouds and content area work using the conjunctions because, but, and so.

Phonics
Last week in Phonics, I was only able to get through the Orientation unit of Fundations, our phonics curriculum, which introduced materials and reviewed letter formation and standard sounds. We worked on our phonemic awareness doing sound segmentations and aural word counting. At home, ask your child to what sound begins and ends spoken words to help them practice their phonemic awareness. 

​This week I plan to review digraphs (ch, sh, th, wh, and ck), blends (i.e. bl, nd, st, and so on), and digraph blends (i.e. shr, thr, nck, and so on), while building our decoding and spelling abilities.

Math
In Math this week we practiced our automatic recall of sums and differences within 10, and later in the week expanded to 20. 

This week, we'll expand our work to sums within 50, and then begin looking at how we can represent and interpret data using picture graphs and bar graphs. Goals for this week:

• Build toward fluency with adding within 100.
• Build toward fluency with subtracting within 20.
  
• Interpret picture and bar graphs.
• Represent data using picture and bar graphs.
• Solve one- and two-step problems using addition and subtraction within 20.

Content Area: Social Studies
Last week I ran out of time to begin Social Studies, but we'll dive in this week. To allow us more time to dive into content area concepts, we alternate our content area block between Science and Social Studies. This month we'll focus on Social Studies, and next month we switch to Science.

This week we begin learning about Maps through our fun curriculum, Histories Mysteries. During this unit, we'll be answering the questions:

• What's the difference between a map and a globe?
• How can a map help us get where we want to go?
• What are the parts of a map and what do they tell us?
• How does a map show the relationship between people and the environment?

Well, that's the general plan for the week. Thank you for reading!