HOW September 11, 2015

Dear Families,

What a whirlwind week! We have been busy learners in our 4 days together. We wrote and illustrated academic and social goals for ourselves. Next week we’ll write personal goals, too!

On Tuesday we made Listening Tools and had to use a lot of Cooperation to get the job done. Everyone is doing a great job practicing how to use these tools appropriately (keep in hands only, cannot be distracting to themselves or others—the goal is to use them to help them listen more attentively).

Many students have also begun to use gum to help them focus and that has been going really well too! We can’t have gum outside our classroom (lunch/recess) or during P.E. and Music but many of our Allied Arts teachers are testing it out to see if it works in their classes too. Typically they get a piece of gum after snack so it’s not wasted when they have to throw it away to eat. They get another piece after lunch for the afternoon. So far, so good! It’s up to each student to monitor their gum consumption and we did have to talk a few times about having only one piece of gum at a time. If you gave your child permission to chew gum, check in with your child to ask if it’s working well for him/her!


We began to learn important Literacy Block routines this week. We talked about “Good Fit” books and how to use the 5 finger rule to check if a book is too easy, too hard, or just right. We know our brains are like rubber bands and we want to stretch them to grow stronger (not too much so that they break or too little so they don’t grow). We did lots of book shopping in our classroom library to fill our book boxes with Good Fit books.

We learned what it looks, sounds, and feels like to Read to Self and made some impressive growth this week—increasing our stamina from 2 minutes to 15 minutes of reading quietly to ourselves!

We also learned what it looks, sounds, and feels like to Partner Read. We are working on how to invite others to read with us, how to share the reading, and what the right volume is for reading to someone. Partner reading is a fun way to practice reading fluency! We increased our stamina from 5 minutes to 10 minutes of quiet, focused partner reading!


2nd grade mathematicians have been using their knowledge of geometric shapes (triangles, rhombuses, hexagons, trapezoids, squares, circles) to fill in a large shape outline with many combinations of pattern blocks. They are noticing patterns of how to combine smaller shapes to fill the same space as a larger shape (i.e. 3 triangles make a trapezoid, 3 rhombuses make a hexagon). They are also learning how to identify coins and tell them apart (pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters). We are counting money too—try it together at home!


We read a few picture books, Boundless Grace and The Reading Race, but we also began our first chapter book—Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle.

We had our first Primary Sing, when we get together with Ben’s class and Mrs. Beidenstein and I lead the classes in song (new and familiar). Mrs. B even accompanies us on her ukulele! We had a fantastic week indeed.



Important Dates:

Monday September 14: Sharing will begin this week

Monday September 14: Hike Permission Slips are due!

Thursday September 17: All School Meeting 10:30 a.m.

Friday September 18: All School Hike

Thursday October 1: K-2 Open House 6-7pm, 3-6 Open House 6:30-7:30pm