Family Newsletter

Dear Families,
We had a great week together.  The kids are still practicing our new routines and schedules.  They are getting used to their new surroundings and friends as well.  They are doing a great job.  I hope they come home and share about our learning here at school.  If they don't,; well, there is always this blog to read together!  I hope the pictures, videos and news-letters help you stay connected with the things we do at school.  Thank you for staying connected and thank you for taking the time to familiarize yourself with our web-site.

Math:
We started math on Harmony this week.  Second graders in my class are divided between the two math classes offered by Ms. Crowley and Mrs. Benoit.  I keep all "my" first graders and get half of the first graders from Ms. Crowley and Mrs. Benoit's classes.  We have math every day and we use Bridges as our curricular guide. Although we have Bridges as a guide, we implement many math fluency skills, through number sense activities and small group instruction.  Please come to our Curriculum meeting at ABS on Wednesday this week to learn more about how we teach math at Allen Brook.

Reading:
This week, I started reading assessments for our first graders.  I will continue with second graders next week.  We use Fountas and Pinnell as our assessment system at Allen Brook.  We primarily assess three areas of reading: fluency, accuracy and comprehension.  We will discuss this in depth on Wednesday night's Curriculum night as well.  In our class now, the students are learning what reading looks like and what it sounds like.  We are also discussing how we choose right books.  We started a new author unit.  We will read the Elmer books by David McKee for the next few weeks.  Through his books, the students will deepen their understanding of reader's workshop and also start to dig deeper into various comprehension strategies.  Homework in reading will not start until after Curriculum night.

Writing:
The students received their writing folders this week.  They also participated in a beginning of the year writing and spelling assessment which will guide instructional approaches in the weeks to come.

Community Building and Responsive Classroom:
We continued to build a strong community of learners this week.  Ms. S, our school counselor, will join our class weekly for the next few weeks and teach us about the zones of regulation.  We talked about our "Peace Corner", a place where students can safely, and freely, take a break if they feel frustrated or unable to participate in our learning activities.  We continued doing work on Kelso's choices and finished our self-portraits. We also started a project with Ms. Crowley's class.  We are creating puppets to represent ourselves and they are going to hang in the space over our lockers.

Friday Folders:
I did not send home Friday folders this week because we are not starting homework until next week and all of our projects this week stayed at school.  Homework will come home in next week's Friday folder.

I hope you all have a great weekend.

Best,
Maria