Please choose a time slot and sign up! 🙂

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B4AA8AE2CAAF58-52178895-fall#

Hello parents! It has been a fabulous and BUSY week in second grade! We have finished up Benchmark Unit 1, worked on Social studies, had a pistons assembly, continued working on our daily scheduling and tweaking our times to help fit everything in, and of course got to play outside in this beautiful weather! Next week we will finish up the social studies unit and swap back to science.

You will not see our writing, spelling, and benchmark work coming home today because I will be looking over and grading it this weekend. Since it was the last week of the unit most of it was modeled but not done together so I can use it for grades. The class did great think through questions, annotating text, and writing responses. They all agreed writing was their least favorite thing at the beginning of the year but they are liking it a little more I hope. It will all come home on Monday for you to look over.

New spelling choice boards and words are coming home in folders today! 🙂

I also gave new books in book bags. Remember we have an expectation of reding for twenty minutes each night. They have leveled books in their bags for this purpose. They can also borrow one of my chapter books in the classroom or use one you have at your home.

In eureka math we are finishing up our place value lessons and working with the straws. If you do not follow our school Instagram page you should! I posted pictures earlier this week of us counting and bundling as we were doing our math lesson. We are moving on to writing numbers in multiple ways.

We will end our Friday with donuts and cider from PTA! They provided this for the membership drive in September. Thanks to the families that joined and Thanks PTA for the treat to end our school week 🙂

Have a great weekend!

*PTA Trunk or Treat – Friday, Oct. 25th at 5:30 pm in the back parking lot.

• Kids & parents can dress up in their Halloween costumes
• Sign Up Genius came home from PTA. Please email me if you would like the link and I will make sure it is forwarded to you. We will need parents to help with donating candy, setup,decorated trunks, and clean up. 

*Classroom Halloween Activities—Thursday, October 31st 

• Activities will be done throughout the school day. 
• We will have some activities, a project and pass out treats to each other. 
• Students can wear black/orange. NO COSTUMES during the school day. 
• Each child should bring in one big bag of candy or goody bag so that they can pass out and share with each friend. It could be candy, a trinket, or something smaller. Email me if you are unsure of this and want to check first. Some favorites in the past have been ring pops, jack o lantern mandarin orange cups, ghost applesauce pouches, etc. 

***Please send in the treat or goody bag that will be passed out to friends by Wednesday, October 30th!***

Visit sign up genius below if you are able to donate things that we need for that day!

https://www.signupgenius.com/go/70A0B4AA8AE2CAAF58-52153085-halloween

This week has flown by and we are officially into in October! We celebrated the end of September with our Character Trait Assembly this morning at breakfast. Isa won the second grade award for Responsibility. i had such a tough choice because they have been doing so well! We talked about how to show responsibility at school. This includes planners being signed, folders emptied each night and shown to parents, taking care of things in our classroom, being responsible and taking things to the office for Mrs. Angela and many other things. Isa was surprised this morning. It was so cool to see so many friends cheering for him when I announced him as our winner…. so many great friends and sports in this classroom. In October we will be working on Kindness!

We are still working on benchmark, eureka math and science and will continue the next few weeks before report card grades are due. Thanks to all who turned in the spelling choice board homework today. Your new spelling words and choice boards come home in todays folder for Unit One Week Three today and are due next Friday. All students all got new books in their reading group bags.

Have a great weekend! 🙂

*Spelling Choice Board due TOMORROW!

*PTA Bake Sale Tomorrow at DISMISSAL! All baked goods are $1. It will be in the cafeteria.

What a busy week! We finally began benchmark and our days seem jam packed! As I keep telling the class we are still working out some kinks and I am playing with the schedule to make sure I can fit everything in the best way. We always begin our mornings with ELA and morning Montessori work times. This gives us a nice and peaceful start to each morning. I have them in groups now and their book bags will come home today! These will be switched out each Friday with leveled readers! My goal was by October so I am happy to start a coupe days before hand!

You will see lots of spelling activities they worked on in the mornings and benchmark writing this week. Our benchmark reproducible had short stories that taught us about the emperor penguin habitats and a short read called Postcards by Alex. We did lots of recall and exploring the texts. We examined new vocabulary, circled paragraphs, and picked out important information to make sure we new the key details from the stories. I will note—- some of the pages we changed the directions around a little to make it easier…. they were intimidated by doing these things independently at first but did AMAZING!!! I am SO PROUD of them!!! We will continue to build upon these skills throughout unit one in hopes that as we progress throughout the year they will become more independent with their comprehension and answering questions. That is a big part of the IReady and MSTEP testing.

Lots of questions are coming up about homework!

It begins NOW! 🙂

In todays folder you will see the “Spelling Choice Board”. You have one week to do FOUR ACTIVITIES from the front page. (**** You do NOT have to turn in the papers proving you did them.. you can just do them. I provided copies for this time only as an example. I will NOT be providing them each time. Think of this as your master copy or example. If you want to make copies you can. If you do not— then just have your child use a spiral notebook or plain piece of paper). YOU ONLY TURN IN THE TOP CHOICE BOARD PAPER EACH FRIDAY! Each week you will get a new choice board paper and the week flier with the new word list. Remember I will have all 10 spelling words and 5 high frequency words on the test the following Friday. I give this on Friday because I understand that kids have after school activities and plans. This way if you would like to do an activity or two over the weekend you may. Or if you want to do all six you also have the time. I require four to get full points on the report card grade.

Part two of homework:

READING BOOK BAGS 🙂 Your child should read 20 minutes nightly. They have 3 books at their level in the book bag. They can read to them selves or you. We are working on building our reading stamina as a class but I would love for them to build this at home also. If you would like additional work then some of these books have writing ideas in the back of them. They are a great resource.

I will not be sending home math homework at this time however- Math Iready pathways AND fluency flight on iready are great practice for them!

I hope you all have a great weekend!

I am out tomorrow for a personal day so I am posting the updates today!

First and most important- Coffee with the Director is on Wednesday, September 25th at 8:45 am! Sorry for the miscommunication I did not know it was wrong on my calendar.

This week we have FINISHED Iready and DRA reading level testing! Wahoooo! All of the kids did a great job doing their best. Starting in October book bags will be coming home with leveled books. They have an expectation of reading nightly!

We have had a great time measuring with cm cubes, rulers, meter sticks, arms, and hands! They are getting lots of partner work this week while measuring and its great to see them working in teams.

Benchmark begins on Monday! The spelling list is coming home tomorrow. The focus letter lets you know our theme, essential question, phonics, spelling words, and high frequency words. I will choose all 10 spelling words and 5 high frequency words for the Week 1 Spelling test that will be on Friday, September 27th! We will be practicing those in the classroom during our Montessori ELA worktimes.

For science we continued talking about Bengali Tigers and their habitats. This morning we did a comparison between there habitats and ours. You will see the bubble map coming home in todays folder.

The students will have Ms. D subbing again tomorrow and I hope the earn some stars for our reward jar while I am away!

Have a great weekend!

Please consider supporting our Howe School PTA by enjoying a meal from Royale with Cheese TONIGHT!

The restaurant will donate 15% of the sales to our school if you mention Howe School when ordering between 3:00-10:00 PM on Wednesday, September 18th.

We appreciate your support!

Amal Ayad- PTA President

Iready math is tomorrow morning at 8:30 am! Get a good nights sleep tonight. Eat a good breakfast and be on time for school! A great morning will help us have a calm and peaceful testing environment again.

Coffee with the Director is on Friday at 8:45 am. All are invited!

I had to alter the math lesson today. We forgot place value over the summer. I had the students do it with me because we drew it to find the answers.

Hello Parents!

We have had a great week! All students completed the IReady reading test. They did a great job of trying their best, having a calm and comfortable learning environment, and being positive when some of the questions got hard. I am so proud of them! On Tuesday of next week we will take the IReady math test.

Just a reminder that IReady scores will not go home until conferences in November. We do this as a whole school because it gives us a chance to talk about them together in person.

This week we started Amplify science. We began by going over our Scientist Rules and discussing what we already know about Plants and Animals. Our unit question is: Why aren’t new chalta trees growing in the Bengal Tiger reserve. The unit began with explaining about the tiger reserve in India and showing us how to use handbooks. We will be continuing our investigation and exploring next week.

For Eureka squared math we took our first quiz on Tuesday! The students did awesome at drawing, labeling, and reading graphs. We have moved on to measuring.

I am still assessing for reading levels and so we will have one more week of review before we begin Benchmark Unit 1.

Have a great weekend! 🙂