Week of September 11-15th

Hi Families,

We made it through our first FULL week of school -hooray! It was a pleasure to meet a number of you at the Back to School Night. Here is a link to my Back to School Night Slideshow and Handout for those that could not make it. I actually forgot to record my voice during the presentation, so I apologize for those who were expecting that. I mostly read from the slideshow though. I will include some of the additional things I said within my Weekly Updates. You can also find more information on the curriculum within the subject tabs at the top of my website.

Important Dates
Wednesday, September 20th: Picture Day!
Friday, October 20th: PTO Monster Mash (rain date: 10/27).

Important Notes

• Snack: Please send in snacks that are easy for students to open, eat, and clean up. The expectation is that students can eat and clean up their morning snack within 10 minutes. I am giving them a few extra minutes at this point in the year since many are still learning how to snack efficiently! Students are allowed to have a quick afternoon snack if they need a boost in energy. If you think your child would benefit from an afternoon snack, please pack something easy to eat, like a granola bar.
• Volunteer Opportunity: (From Ms. Becker, our school librarian) Calling all volunteers!!!  There will be a volunteer training on Monday September 25 at 8:30 in the Barrows Library.  Please sign up here to attend the training. If you would like to volunteer in the library on a weekly basis, please sign up here.  Please reach out to Mrs. Becker with any questions @ [email protected].  
• Volunteering in the Classroom: We will have volunteer opportunities in the classroom once we have established classroom routines and students reliably follow expectations. I will send out more information on in-class volunteering in the next Weekly Update. In the meantime, if you are interested, please see Mrs. Walsh in the front office to fill out a CORI form or make sure your previous CORI form is up-to-date.

---

All About Me

Name Tags

2nd Grade Dot Day Display

Here are some highlights from this week:

Community Building

• Playful Morning Meeting greetings: “Elbow Bump,” “Foot Tap,” and “Fist Bump of Glory;”
• Activities: “Alibi,” “Four Corners,” “What Do You See?,” and “What Are You Doing?”
• Shares about our lives and asking questions of each other;
• The “no talking” Colored Dot Game.

Literacy

• Focused on “Noticing detail and asking questions, like Why? What? and Who?
• Read aloud and discussed the books “When You Begin,” “Looking After Louis,” “Adrian Simcox Does Not Have a Horse,” and “My Name is Yoon,” and discussed how we treat classmates who are different than us: by being accepting, patient, and encouraging;
• Continued reading aloud from the chapter book, “There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom,” by Louis Sachar and made inferences about characters;
• Watched a read aloud of “The Dot,” and made our own creative colored dots to display in the hallway with the entire 2nd grade;
• Selected books from the decodable book library to practice decoding and fluency with targeting phonics patterns;
• Worked on building independent reading stamina;
• Began more assessment from the new curriculum, ARC Core.

Phonics

• Continued oral phonemic awareness activities to practice rhyming, segmenting, blending, and isolating sounds in words;
• Overview our Consonant Sound Wall and Vowel Sound Wall, an important tool for spelling;
• Practiced articulating all 44 sounds in English;

Writing

• Learned about the parts of a sentence (subject and predicate) and verbs;
• Practiced capitalization rules: first letter of a sentence and the names of people, places, and dates.

Math

• Reviewed on adding and subtracting within 10;
• Played “Behind My Back,” to practice fact fluency within 10 and 20;
• Played a Ms. Kimball original game, “Add It,” similar to cribbage;
• Modeled addition and subtraction within 10 and 20 using 10-frames, connecting cubes, and equations.

Below, students working on pencil control, double ten-frame addition and subtraction, a math game, some math coloring, and finding their dot matches with our Silent Colored Dot Game.

Consonant Sound Wall

"Vowel Valley" Sound Wall

​​​
​Thank you for taking the time to read the update! Please reach out with any questions.