Dear Parents,

How are you all doing? It has been a great privilege having your scholars in our class. Ms. Peterson and I are excited about the learning taking place in our class already. We had a great first week building our class community. It was nice seeing students adapt to their new environments and make new friends. Our main focus amidst so many last week was handwriting, and we will continue to reinforce this important skill in the new week. We have actively commenced teaching and will continue at this pace in the coming week.

Language arts

Spalding

We will continue to review 8 new phonograms everyday and work on improving handwriting. We will appreciate it if you reinforce this at home.

 Reading

                This week we will be reading the poem, “Bed in Summer” by Robert Louis Stevenson. Students will recite poem in class. They will bring a copy home to study, and on Friday they will recite it in class collectively for now. Please, encourage your child to practice reciting their poems. We are enjoying our literature book, Charlotte’s Web. As we read how the characters are forming their friendships, we will be relating Mr. Zuckerman’s barn to our class as we build our classroom community.  We will read chapters 4 – 7. We will continue to send home a passage every night for reading and comprehension homework.

                Our first saying of the year is “Don’t judge a book by its cover.”  Students engaged in conversations that shed light on the true meaning of the saying. We concluded that we should focus on internal qualities that people have rather than their outward looks. This week, our saying will be to develop “cold feet”. We will discuss the difference between the literal and figurative meaning of this popular saying. Please, encourage your scholars by using this sayings and phrases at home.

Writing

We will begin writing instruction this week using our text: Writing with Ease. Students will engage in story narration, dictation, summarization and copy work as they develop their writing skill at a developmentally appropriate level. Their worksheets will come home on a weekly basis, so that you can see their performance on a weekly basis.

GRAMMAR 

We will begin Grammar this week, and our focus will be on common and proper nouns. We will also explore how pronouns take the place of a nouns.               

               

Math

                We will continue to work in our Singapore Math books: counting
“Numbers to 1,000.”  We will be working with reading and writing numbers, grouping numbers to show place value, skip counting, and reviewing addition and subtraction math facts to 20.   We are asking that students NOT go ahead in the Singapore Workbook, even if they “know how to do it.”

                In addition to the math homework, which will generally be from the workbook, we ask that you continue to work with your child on mastering the addition and subtraction facts to 20.  This is a crucial foundation for fully understanding place value, and it will help as we begin to decompose (break down) numbers while learning mental math strategies. 

HISTORY

Our Geography began with the study of maps, the North American countries, and the seven continents.  This week, we will move south of our border into Central America, the West Indies, and South America.

SCIENCE

We will begin our study of the seasons.  We will explore the questions :How does the Earth move? What causes seasons?  Earth’s tilted orbit around the sun causes seasons We will talk about how Earth rotates on its axis and then revolves around the sun.  We readjusted our annual plan, so we will teach water cycle later in the coming months.

ART (A message from our Art teacher)

Our students have art class one Wednesday a month.  We are having 2nd & 3rd grade students bring in a piece of artwork that day to share with the class. This is not required and does not count towards the grade. But some student make a lot of artwork at home and this is an opportunity to share those projects. It could be crochet, clay, painting, any artwork without pop culture references.

VIRTUE

Friendship

We are working on solidifying an environment of friendship and support. Please encourage your scholars to look out for their classmates. I believe that forming friendships will help break barriers to learning and enjoying school.

Announcements (look out for the announcement corner on the website in the coming week.)

Scholars are expected to be in school everyday in proper dress code. Please check family handbook for details.

Please encourage scholars to use their best handwriting at all times, even if it means doing their work over again several times. Homework that is not carefully written and done neatly will be sent back home to be rewritten.

Thanks to those who filled out a “Volunteer” handout.  We appreciate your willingness to serve as a volunteer.  Please, be patient with us as we get the school year rolling smoothly before we begin volunteerism in the classroom. 

Quote of the week

Do not train children to learn by force and harshness, but direct them to it by what amuses their minds, so that you may be better able to discover with accuracy the peculiar bent of the genius of each    - Plato

Once again, I say a very big thank you to you all for your support so far, and I am

very optimistic about the success stories on the way.

Mrs. Toyin Atolagbe & Ms. Elizabeth Peterson

for

Class 2A