Weekly Newsletter for 3/29/19

Dear 2nd Grade Families,

This week your child took the Youth Chinese Test (YCT) on the computer. This assessment is to test your child’s overall understanding of the Mandarin language including listening and reading comprehension. The results of the test will be delivered differently than last year since the test was digital. I will keep you informed as we learn what the new process will be.

The yearbook cover contest is now ongoing. If your child chooses to participate, please make sure that they design on an 8.5″x11″ sheet of paper vertically and write “Stonebrae Elementary School Yearbook 2018-2019” somewhere on the cover and that they have checked for correct spelling and capitalization. All entries are due to Ms. Rubino no later than Tuesday, April 9th. She will not accept any late entries and all submissions will not be returned.

Science fair information was passed out in today’s Friday folder. Participation is optional. In order to participate, you need to contact your child’s teacher and let them know that your child plans to enter a project into the science fair in order to reserve a board. Please let me know by April 5th.

There is NO SCHOOL on Monday in observance of Cesar Chavez Day. School will resume on Tuesday. Spirit week is also next week and the theme is as follows:

• Tuesday: Crazy Hair Day
• Wednesday: Character Day
• Thursday: Throwback Thursday
• Friday: Pajama Day

This Week in English Language Arts/Writing…

Your child is learning about homonyms and studying ‘aw’ spelling patterns. We are wrapping up our inferencing unit by practicing using our background knowledge and connecting it with the text to figure out what the author did not directly write and tell us. I’ve been working with small groups to build reading strategies for fluency and to work on decoding tricky words. In writing, we are starting to take our stories and brainstorming/pre-writing the details to match our story structure for our personal narrative unit.

This Week in Math…

We are revisiting word problems and identifying if we are missing a part or a total and learning various strategies to find our answer. We also had a short lesson on rounding to the nearest ten. Your child will revisit this topic in 3rd grade.

This Week in Chinese…

In our Mandarin class, we continue to reinforce the class and school expectations, routines and procedures; classroom expressions; numbers; days of the week; directions; shapes, time; and currency. We reviewed some math concepts in Chinese and continued with Lesson 8 including vocabulary, phrases, dialogs, the story and the passage in class. We did the bell work, the on-stage presentation about self (optional), read digital books, practiced character strokes, tried to make complete sentences as well as played academic games, sang songs, learned mini-lessons from mystery science, and their scientific terms in Mandarin. We continued to read stories about Chinese culture and tradition, practiced the online mock test, and YCT was given on 3/28.

Week 26 homework can be found here:  https://graceyou.com/week-26/

Important Dates:

• 4/1 – Cesar Chavez Day – No School
• 4/5 – Last day to inform your teacher regarding participation in the science fair
• 4/9 – New Parent Tour
• 4/9 – Yearbook Cover Designs Due to Ms. Rubino
• 4/15 – 4/19 – Spring Break – NO SCHOOL
• 4/22 – 4/26 – Ally Week
• 4/30 – Minimum Day/Open House/Science Fair

Have a great 3-day weekend!

-Ms. You