Weekly Update for 9/26

Hi Families!
Fall is here! I hope your children are feeling good about school and enjoying 2nd grade so far. I sure am!

Important Dates this Week

• Monday 9/26: There will be a substitute all day. I will be at a training on the new math curriculum with a few other teachers.
• Thursday 9/29: There will be a substitute for the morning. I will be at another math curriculum training.

Weekly Barrows Newsletter
​Here is the link to the latest Starburst from Principal Gallegos. Lots of important school-wide and district-wide information in there.

Principal Gallegos has asked teachers to highlight the following important safety and personal property reminders:

• No cars or pedestrians are allowed in the school parking lot for drop off or pick up. Both teachers and parents have had recent scares with vehicles, so it is best if no one is walking through, especially our students.
• Please remind your children that playground rules apply through dismissal (kids should stay out of the woods, off trees and the ball wall).
• Label all items that aren't worn for the entirety of the day (hats, sweaters, coats, lunch boxes, etc.)​

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

---

Student counting words in a sentence as part of our phonemic awareness practice.

Playing the card game "Make 10" during Math.

Learning about various map projections during Social Studies.

Our first All School Assembly! Learning about our Barrows Beliefs.

Community Building
We've set a good foundation for how we live and work in our shared space. Still more to do, but I'm feeling good about our routines so far. I continue to tweak things. For example, this week I adjusted our morning time routine to be more inviting for students. There will now be 3-4 activity options, such as a puzzle, drawing, or sensory activity like Play-Doh for students to choose from. I hope it will help them transition positively from home to school, help them learn some social negotiation skills, and give me time to check in with individual students.

We had our first All School Assembly on Wednesday. Super fun! We'll be reviewing our Barrows Belief of persevering this week. What does it mean to try hard even when things are challenging?

Literacy 
I continue reading aloud from There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom by Louis Sachar.
We'll practice the nursery rhymes from our Fluency Packet #2. 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 didn't get to literary writing last week, but I hope this week we will be writing complex sentences about our read alouds and content area work using the conjunctions because, but, and so.

Phonics

• Reviewed 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) last week.

This week, we will:

• Take a short assessment on blends and digraphs.
• Review when to spell with "c", "k", or "ck".
• Practice some 1st grade trick words (said, they, one)
• Review closed syllables (syllables with one short vowel closed off by a consonant.)

Math
In Math this week we continued to practice our automatic recall of sums and differences within 10. I concocted a card game called "Make 10" to help students build mental fluency with sums and differences around 10. The 2nd grade team decided that the new math curriculum moves too quickly toward working with sums within 50, so we slowed down to allow students an opportunity to build mastery within 10. Therefore, we'll be tackling last week's goals this week.

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.

Content Area: Social Studies
We launched our unit on Maps with our fun curriculum, Histories Mysteries. Students learned about the conundrum of map makers (cartographers) who try to take a spherical earth and turn it into a flat map.

This week, we'll be exploring the following questions:

• What's the difference between a map and a globe?
• How can a map help us get where we want to go?

Students will read maps, make maps, and learn more about different map projections.

That's the general plan for the week. Thank you for reading!