Good Morning,
I hope this finds all of you well. Another week is in the books and if I were a ship captain I might say "smooth sailing as far as the eye can see." What a great start to the year. This week the students each identified an academic/classroom goal that they each want to achieve as we start this school year. The students then illustrated their goal, colored them in and they are will be displayed in the classroom. These will also be used in helping create our classroom rules next week. I am working on a way to share these out digitally. I have some ideas but want to see what our open house looks like.
This week the students also finished their all about me books. We will share these over the next two weeks and then they will come home for you to see. I will ask that they are sent back because they will be kept in our classroom library. This way kids can check out a book about another student and bring it home to share with you.
In math the 1st graders have been working on fact fluency, number bonds (part, part, total) of an addition equation and numeral writing. I am really hoping to fix any reversals by November. I also had a discussion with the students about addition, approaches used, and how to be efficient. Learning to add follows 4 progressions. The beauty of 1st grade is you will have a class with students each at one of the four. If you would like to learn more about the general idea, this article may be of interest. You will hear your child discussing strategies such as counting all, counting on, known facts, using a known fact to solve another.
Ms. Figdor sent this note along regarding 2nd grade math. Hello, my name is Alison Figdor and I will be teaching your second graders math this year. I previously taught in the Harwood Unified School District as a 3rd/4th grade teacher at the Brookside School. I’m excited to teach your children math, and I’m looking forward to an enjoyable and productive school year. The past few weeks in second grade math have been busy. We have been learning routines and talking about what we need from each other to be a community of learners. At the same time, we have been exploring how to understand and analyze data. Our first step was to create beetle glyphs, pictures that represented who we are. For example, the color of the glyph represented our favorite season. Then we used these glyphs to explore how to sort and organize data. As part of the data analysis we created Venn diagrams, pictographs, and bar graphs and wrote observations about the data on these graphs. Our next focus will be working on becoming more fluent on our addition facts to 20. Being fluent with the basic facts will be extremely important as we move towards working with larger numbers.
The class has also been working on letter formation and we practice 2 letters each day until we get through them all. Again, the idea here is to teach correct formation and eliminate reversals as quick as we can. This will take longer than fixing the numeral reversals.
NOTES:
*Please remember that book orders are due 09/27/21 Shop Our Class Page: https://orders.scholastic.com/K3277 Shop Digital Flyers for Our Grade with Your Child: https://clubs.scholastic.com/grade2 Please share the Class Page link to extended family and friends. All orders also earn FREE Books for our class.
*Homework bags Overall the class has been doing a great job with this. Please help your child come up with some kind of routine where he/she backs the book in the bag and puts it in his/her backpack before going to bed.
That is all for now. I hope you all have a great weekend. The Harwood Varsity Soccer team has a game at 11:00 this Saturday (at Harwood). My daughter is one of the starting center backs. If you want to see a bunch of hardworking athletes, come check out the game Saturday.
Peace,
Mr. Young
YOUR CHILD'S NEW TWITTER POST. This is what they liked best last week.
