Week of September 15-22

​Hi Families,
Another busy 5-day school week finished! Hooray! We welcomed a new student to class this week -welcome Josiah! We also smiled pretty for Picture Day. Students are getting the hang of classroom routines and expectations, some more quickly than others, but we’ll get there! We are gradually building a strong, safe, and supportive classroom community.

SPECIAL REQUEST: Please send your child to school with a family photo or a photo of your child and caregivers doing something fun. We will use this and next week to share about them. (If you can’t get a hard copy of the photo, you can email it to me.)

Important Dates

• Friday, October 20th: PTO Monster Mash (rain date: 10/27).

Important Notes
Below I describe a couple of issues that have presented a few challenges this week:

• Bathroom Use: 2nd grade is the first year when students leave the classroom to use the bathroom. We share the bathrooms with the entire 2nd and 3rd grade. Students ask for permission to use the bathroom using a non-verbal signal. They take one of 2 bathroom passes for our classroom and leave the room. They are expected to do their business quickly and return to class. I have noticed that some students are frequent flyers to the bathroom; some are timing their requests poorly (asking to go while I’m giving directions for an assignment or during important whole-class instruction). A few students are asking to use the bathroom as many as 3 times in 2 hours. Since I cannot leave the classroom to check on the bathrooms, plus it is challenging to know when students are asking to go in order to escape work or get a bonus break, I have asked that students do their very best to use the bathroom during our breaks or outside of times when whole-class instruction or directions are being given. I also conveyed that my expectation is that 2nd graders should only need to use the bathroom once within 2 hours. If you know that your child needs to use the bathroom more frequently than that, please let me know. Obviously, if it’s an emergency, students can go! I want to respect everyone’s bodily needs and don’t want students to have any anxiety in regards to using the bathroom. However, I also need to set boundaries so that teaching and learning can happen effectively. Students can miss a lot when they are out of the room. I would greatly appreciate it if you could have a conversation with your child about your own expectations for using the bathroom during the school day. If your expectations are very different from mine, please reach out so we can discuss. If you have any concerns regarding the bathroom, please don’t hesitate to contact me.

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• Nurse Visits: Another recent area of challenge has been the frequency of health complaints. As soon as one child complains that their stomach hurts, that they’re not feeling well, or that they feel sore somewhere on their body, then 4 or 5 more students suddenly seem to feel ill or sore as well. While I care about every student and want to send them to the nurse for legitimate health concerns, especially for symptoms related to the onset of an illness or a bad injury, I am having a hard time figuring out when students have legitimate health concerns or when they simply just need to cope with whatever discomfort they may have. Colds are definitely going around right now and I want to monitor for anyone who may have the beginnings of a fever. However, if I sent everyone who complained about their body to the nurse, she would be inundated and I would be left to teach 8 kids. My strategy has been to ask students to get a drink of water, have some food, and then take a 5 minute rest in the back of the room to see if that helps. Many times, this has worked  and kept students from visiting the nurse for simply being tired or uncomfortable. I would greatly appreciate it if you could also have a conversation with your child about your own expectations for requesting a nurse visit and dealing with health discomforts. I know that getting used to academic, social, and school demands can be a challenge for many, especially if their summer break was laid back and easy. Sometimes the anxiety of dealing with that challenge can translate into a queasy stomach or a headache. I hope to help students learn to discern the difference between issues that require a nurse and issues that require coping skills. Thank you so much for your help with this!

Volunteer Opportunity:

• Special Guest Mondays: Our class will be having “Special Guest Mondays”  two times a month, where a parent or caregiver can come in to read a story, present about their profession, or share about a hobby or passion. I encourage guests to relate their presentation to our academic content, particularly science, engineering, math, social studies, or literacy. Here is the Special Guest Mondays Sign Up Google Doc. Feel free to reach out if you have any questions! Thank you!

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Here are some highlights from this week:

Community Building

• Morning Meeting team building: “Dance Greeting,” “Pass the Zip,” “Coseeki,” and “Hey There Neighbor.” Students loved playing “Pass the Zip,” where everyone is in a circle and I time students to see how long it takes them to each say “zip” in order. I believe our best time is 6.66 seconds!
• Discussed and reinforced the importance of listening to each other by showing “full body listening:” still body, facing the speaker, heart and mind caring and thinking about what the speaker is saying;
• Learned “Talk Moves,” discussion strategies to enhance learning and thinking.

Literacy

• “Shopped” for books from our 3 different classroom libraries: decodable books, leveled books, and general books, choosing 2 from each section;
• Established our Literacy Skills block expectations for independent work and reading, monitoring and building our reading stamina;
• Continued reading aloud from the chapter book, “There’s a Boy in the Girl’s Bathroom,” by Louis Sachar and modeled how to think aloud as I read;
• Watched a short video from a series about how the brain learns to read, called “Brain Builders;”
• Read, “Our Class is a Family,” and discussed ways we can make school feel more like home.

Writing

• Identified sentences and fragments, rewriting sentences using correct capitalization and punctuation and completing fragments;
• Practiced sentence dictation, using our working memories to keep a short sentence in our heads and writing it down;
• Wrote one or more sentences related to a short text.

Phonics

• Reviewed short vowel sounds and spelling patterns, particularly within consonant clusters, as used in words such as “spent,” “champ,” and “sprint;”
• Learned how to use letter tile boards to practice phonemic awareness and spelling;
• Took a “Phonics Progress Check” on this CCVCC pattern and its variations (C for consonant, V for vowel).

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Math

• Continued to model addition and subtraction within 10 and 20 using 10-frames, connecting cubes, and equations;
• Played “Shake and Spill” game, to practice fluency within 10 and 20 as well as writing equations;
• Used 10-frames to model addition with 2-digit numbers (without composing).

Science

• Launched our introductory Science unit on “What is a Scientist?”
• Shared our thoughts on what scientists do.

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