Dear Families,
Today was Ms. Bassett’s last day with us. We are sad to see her leave our classroom but we are very excited that she now has an opportunity to continue her teacher training elsewhere. Ms. Bassett will be missed! The students wrote postcards to her, which we bound together with matching photographs of the students.
Thank you for joining our classroom this semester, Ms. Bassett! Thank you for helping the students learn more deeply and for being patient, flexible and all-around awesome!
Here is our week in review:
Social-Emotional Learning:
This week, the students learned more about how to identify their own feelings and those of others. They learned that if we can identify feelings effectively, we can more easily navigate different situations with other people. The students worked on their feelings cubes and started to play a game with their partners, identifying the feelings represented on their cubes.
We had another restorative circle with Ms. Nicole. This week, we focused on perspective taking and how we can understand how other people are thinking and feeling.
Ms. Nicole also visited our classroom with her dog Ziggy, who is now a Therapy Dog. Ziggy will be at ABS a few days a week, helping students learn and regulate emotions. We all got to meet Ziggy this week. Thank you, Ms. Nicole for visiting our classroom!
Reading:
We started a new mini-unit on visualization in reading. In this unit, the students will learn how to effectively visualize different aspects of the books they read to reach a deeper understanding of the story. We added two more stations to our reading classes to reflect this focus. The students are doing a great job showing active engagement during our independent reading times.
We continued to read graphic novels in our read aloud times. This week, we read the first book about Shelby and Watts by Ashlyn Anstee, a series that revolves around the characters Shelby and Watt, who together solve mysteries, while sharing scientific facts and tangible ways we can help keep our earth safe and clean.
Writing:
The students continued adding more words to their personal narratives this week. They stretched out their stories over many pages by adding transition words to show the passage of time and adding describing words.
The students started a new hand-writing booklet this week too. While focusing on penmanship and letter formation, they are also challenged to correct errors in these booklets to reflect proper capitalization, punctuation and finger-spacing. They are amazing word detectives!
Math:
In math, we focused on story problems, showing our understanding in numbers and drawings using models and diagrams. This week, the students solved problems involving two two-digit numbers.
This week, the students participated in many Number Talks, a time when they share their mental math strategies with each other. They are encouraged to make sense of the problems by always asking themselves “What do I already know about….”. For example, adding 62+27 is easier when you anchor 62 to 60 (as it is closer to 60). Second grade mathematicians are encouraged to find larger friendlier groups of numbers and disciples.
This week, the students played a number of games practicing these skills and basic number sense. Ms. Schaw, our fabulous ABS Math Interventionist also joined our class to teach us about number paths and number lines. Thank you, Ms. Schaw.
Technology:
Our class participated in the world-wide “Hour of Code” lessons encouraging young students to get interested in computer programming and coding. This week, Ms. Scott joined our classroom and taught the students about how they could program our BeeBots. We learned so much and had so much fun. We will continue next week. Here are some pictures. Ask your child to explain what we did.
News and Reminders:
Please see this letter excerpt from our school:
How does ABS celebrate and acknowledge student birthdays?
At a recent faculty meeting we discussed all the ways we celebrate student birthdays and discovered that this varies from class to class, and student to student. As we all know, not everyone celebrates the same and may not even choose to celebrate at all…and that is ok.
We decided as a faculty/staff that it would be important to keep the acknowledgement and celebration just at school. This means we are asking that families NOT send in any treats, gifts, invitations/thank you notes to give out to the children. Each child (who chooses to be acknowledged) hears their birthday on the announcements and gets to come and get a birthday pencil/bookmark from the Principal. We appreciate your support and understanding moving forward.
Have a great weekend,
Maria
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