Weekly Newsletter for 9/28/18

Dear 2nd Grade Families,

Thank you for the donations of school supplies and Amazon Wishlist items. Some items have arrived without any note regarding the sender, so if I haven’t thanked you for your generous contribution, please know that you are appreciated! Please remember check your child’s Friday Folder for important documents, returned work, and Week 3 homework.

Some students are struggling with the Chinese homework. The pages 1-4 are completed in class, one per day (unless there’s a scheduling conflict) and most of the answers/words are found in the passage or the previous pages. Please remind your child to pay attention to their classwork so they can feel successful with their homework when they come home. You may submit your child’s reading passage in any way that is convenient for you. One way that may be convenient is to upload a video from your phone to your child’s portfolio on ClassDojo.

This Week in English Language Arts/Writing…

We have been continuing with personal narrative in our Writer’s Workshop. We have been learning how to brainstorm, prewrite, and work on our sloppy copies (rough drafts). We have also been learning spelling strategies to help us spell and read tricky words. We have also been studying the most commonly misspelled high frequency words. This week we started working on our independent reading for Reader’s Workshop and discussed how to focus our brain to study the text and build reading stamina to help with our comprehension. I am pulling students from both classes to assess their reading score, which is a lengthy process. I will be contacting families who pick up their child after school to see if you are able to stay a little longer or pick up your child later so that I may assess their reading after school.

This Week in Math…

We have been working on retelling word problems in our own words. This helps your child determine the important information and also if we are adding or subtracting. You can help your child by asking them to retell the word problems in their homework in their own words. For example, “There are 9 dogs in the house and 6 dogs in the street” could be rephrased as “I see 9 dogs at home and 6 dogs on the road.” We have also been learning multiple ways to solve a problem. The main strategies we have been covering are writing an equation (horizontally and vertically), math mountains, and a number picture.

This Week in Chinese…

In our Mandarin class, we continue to reinforce the class and school expectations, routines and procedures; classroom expressions; numbers (1-31); days of the week (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday). We practiced our new materials, MeiZhou Chinese, Level 2, and started Lesson 1 on pictographs. We practiced the passage out loud and lesson 1 vocabulary (beef, bird nest, name, road, …), and assigned related worksheet as in-class activities. We did the bell work, watched Zhong Zhong Teaching Chinese overhead projectors, and read about Moon Festival. We also reviewed colors and was introduced to famous tourist places on a map of China as well as played games, sang songs, practiced math, read books and other kinetic activities.

Here’s the link for Week 3 Chinese Homework: https://graceyou.com/week-3/

Important Dates:

• 10/2/18 – PTA Board Meeting
• 10/4 – Dining Day at Mod Pizza Castro Valley
• 10/5 –  Vision to Learn Eye Screening
• 10/12 – Picture Day
• 10/17 – Husky Trot
• 10/19 – ELAC Meeting
• 10/26 – Fall Fest Trick or Treat

Have a great weekend!

-Ms. You