What an eventful and exciting week in room 118! Back to School Night, The Book Fair and Homecoming were definitely the exciting parts of the week! MAP testing was another large chunk of the time and your kids persevered through some LONG tests! I reminded the kids daily to do their best and use their reading strategies to help solve problems. MAP testing is one indicator of your child’s progress but NOT the entire picture of your child. I will be sharing their scores with you at parent teacher conferences but in the mean time if you have any questions, please let me know! Here’s the rundown of our week:

Reading:
We began our mini lessons on the Daily Café Menu, starting with comprehension. We learned a great comprehension strategy of Checking for Understanding. We would stop every couple pages to CHECK for understanding by asking, who and what? We will continue to learn new strategies in the next few days.

Writing:
We are working away at our personal narratives. We talked a lot about using details in our writing this week. We began using our senses to draw more details into our writing. I gave examples from my writing using my sight and smell senses to come up with more ideas within my writing. You children are building up their writing stamina and telling me some great stories about trips you’ve been on, places you have visited or favorite birthday parties!

Math:
We finished the oral portion to our Chapter 1 math test on Monday, had MAP testing on Tuesday and began Chapter 2 on Wednesday. Chapter two is really focusing on basic and extended facts. We cut up our addition and subtraction fact triangles and began practicing our basic math facts in 3 seconds or less. Please check your child’s homework folder tonight for their chapter 1 IPP. This will give you an idea as to how your child is doing on the skills taught so far this school year. Chapter 1 is a lot of second grade review, so overall the whole class did a great job!!! Basic facts are always a rough area to start the school year, so please start including fact practice into your nightly routine.

Social Studies:
We wrapped up our rights and responsibilities unit and will be starting to learn about the human body in the next few days. Science and social studies unfortunately will be interrupted next week with a guidance class, two computer classes and a library class! Not all weeks will be laid out like this, but due to MAP testing we had to rearrange our schedule a bit.

Overall, we had a very busy week! Back to school night was a lot of fun and I enjoyed having conversations with you and your families. We had a very spirited homecoming Friday reading some new books from the book fair, writing school spirit poems for the football team, making posters with our reading buddies and attending the parade! Please enjoy your weekend and time with your family! Happy Homecoming and GO PANTHERS!!!
Mrs. Luehmann :)