Highlights from Sarah's 1st Leadership Week

Dear Families,

First, I want to start by saying that I am so grateful to have had this opportunity to get to know all of your amazing children. They are so kind and caring each and every day. It is such a wonderful community to be a part of!


This week we started an integrated social studies and writing unit on families and family traditions at home and around the world. Each of the children worked on writing ‘How-To’ instructions about a food tradition that was important to them. We also learned about the different parts of nonfiction writing in the form of a ‘Painted Essay’ and are now starting the process of writing our own painted essays from the survey of family holidays and traditions that went home before thanksgiving break.

In 2nd grade math we started the week reviewing our doubles, near doubles, and two apart double the middle addition facts. They had their first fact fluency quiz on Wednesday and they absolutely rocked it after just two days of reviewing! We will practice these same fact families more next week transitioning away from addition and into subtraction. In addition to reviewing these fact families we have also been working more on 2- and 3-digit number strings, practicing organizing and showing our math thinking when adding more than 2 numbers together at a time. We will keep working more on this next week.

1st grade mathematicians have been continuing their work with make-10 addition facts and using number lines to help with adding.


During read aloud this week we began reading The Fraidy-Cat Cure in Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle's Farm, discussing the character traits of some of the new characters introduced in this chapter (Phoebe & her family members). We have also been making some predictions about how Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle might cure Phoebe of her many fears. We also had a chance to read The Greedy Python, looking for juicy words to help expand our vocabulary, and practicing retelling the story afterwards to build comprehension.

This Friday Mrs. Fox talked to the children about the upcoming Winter Solstice party and the Secret Snowflake tradition. Please keep an eye out for letters with information about these events coming home.

This has been a great first week and I am so looking forward to next week!

Have a great weekend!

~Sarah