Newsletter: January 19th

 Hey Everyone,

Thanks so much for (virtually) making it out for our Gathering last week. The kids did such a fabulous job of putting all that together. They wrote their own parts, created their slides, and rehearsed until they felt comfortable sharing out to a large group. It's always so much fun to see how much children grow over the course of two years together in second and third grades. They become soooo much more confident and independent.

Last week we were also able to meet our 1st grade reading buddies for the first time. Delayed by COVID (and Mrs. Palmatier's maternity leave), we waited until mid-year to launch this structure. Reading buddies give our kids an opportunity to model strong literacy practices for the younger kids as well as coach them through their own books. Of course, this work helps us in incredible ways as well. As we notice and name the things we want to see our 1st grade reading buddies doing as readers and discussing ways to support them into this work we also remind ourselves of what's important in our own reading. Here are some pics from our first meeting last week. You'll notice we used the Gathering Room to ensure we could spread both classes out in a really big space. 

In writing, the kids are sharing the memory stories they wrote just before Winter Break. They always love the opportunity to go public with their work. In regard to curriculum, these stories allowed us to learn about generating ideas for new writing, creating pre-writing notes to organize ideas, adding greater detail to help the reader better understand and imagine what's happening, using description to make images in our reader's heads, and creating dialogue to help advance the story. The kids' stories turned out so well. They worked hard to draft by hand, revise and edit, type their stories out, and then revise and edit one more time before sharing these with their friends. Here are a few pics of them writing over the past week or so. In these photos, you can see they've moved on to writing with partners (if they so wish) on "free write" pieces. Our next inquiry will be into Text Dependent Analysis pieces so we can begin preparing a bit for the end-of-year standardized tests we have to take.

In math, we've been learning to measure to the nearest quarter-inch. This required a bit of learning about fractions. We'll be launching a focused inquiry into fractions over the next week or so.

Finally, I'd like to introduce a new addition to our classroom - Mr. Grantham. Mr. Grantham is a student intern from USC who will graduate this May and join our teaching forces next fall. He will be posting an introduction to the blog very soon so you can learn more about him.

Have a great week,

Chris