On the Road to Success

I am already seeing so much growth from students! Today we finished Unit 2 of math and all students (every single one) aced it! This is no surprise though because with the new 2-block structured math we are doing, each student is engaged, math is hands-on and differentiated. There are more opportunities for teacher check-in's and students are doing more learning through exploration and numbers talks, where they have more opportunity to share their thinking. Less teacher-talk and more student involvement. The next unit in math we will focus on part-part-total and looking at addends.


In reading students are now fully emersed in the new Superkids curriculum, working on digraphs: sh, ch, and tch. Students have shown us how strong their segmentation of phonemes are through all of the data that we have collected and now to build fluency we are working on recognizing word patterns and onset and rime (beginning sound and clumping the second sound together). We are also encouraging students to take the larger words and break them apart, Students worked on this during our first guided reading from our Superkids Readers. Students took a copy of these home today and I encourage you to read them again and again with your child to build fluency. The story's title is, Patch in a Pinch. Students also practiced thinking through the story and isolating the problem/solution.

Students are wrapping up their Small Moments stories and putting final touches, such as labeling, adding think and speech bubbles, illustrating and adding a cover, before publishing. It was nice to sit down with each student and edit his/her story. Our next units will be How To and All About stories.

We have also been working on our Second Step curriculum, where students have been discussing anger, frustration, looking and body language and talking about emotions. We have been discussing self-help/management skills but also, how to help and comfort a friend. Students have some wonderful strategies and ideas, such as taking deep breaths and finding a quiet space to calm down.

As a reminder, next week we start conferences, so keep your eyes peeled for a conference date/time reminder in your child's folder. I look forward to meeting with each of you! Enjoy your weekend!