Weekly News
10/27/25-10/31/25
Our Choice Time unit “Around the World” continued this week with more mapping activities, Day of the Dead, and a little Halloween thrown in. If your family has a history or traditions from around the world that you would like to share with us, please reach out to your contact teacher so we can get something scheduled! And if you would like to be a Choice Time volunteer, please sign up here.
Our next field trip will be on November 13! We will be visiting the Lam Museum of Anthropology at Wake Forest University to tie in with our Knowledge and Choice Time units. For this field trip, please make sure your student brings a lunch. Arrival and dismissal times will follow our regular schedule. We do not need parent chaperones for this one either, but if you want to join us, please reach out to your contact teacher to discuss.
In Literacy, first graders continued with their long vowels with the magic e pattern, adding o and i to their repertoire this week! We are also learning more tricky/heart words and building our fluency while reading in our decodable readers. In Knowledge, we read several stories about tiny characters - “Tom Thumb,” “Thumbelina,” and “Issun Boshi.” We also practiced our skills of comparing and contrasting.
Second graders spent a good amount of time working on writing their fictional narratives. We are almost done! We got through writing and editing and hopefully will complete our final drafts at the beginning of next week. Along with editing, we spent more time practicing HOW to edit for punctuation, commas, and quotation marks. Leslie has been reviewing our new Vowel Valley literacy tool! HUGE Thanks to Christine and Leslie for putting this up on the wall in our room! It is a fantastic reminder of the sounds and the articulation when saying these vowels and vowel blends.
In Knowledge, we continued our study of Early Asian Civilizations and have moved into the country of China. We started by learning about The Yellow and the Yangtze Rivers in China. Ask your student if they know how the Yellow River got its name? (Answer: Rain and wind wash the silt —a fine mixture of soil, sand, and clay—from the mountains into the river, making it a muddy yellow.) This week we will read about more of the paper, writing, and calligraphy that was used in ancient times.
In math, first graders finished our first topic on subtraction! We also started Topic B this week - another short intro Topic focused on word problem strategies like Read - Draw - Write. We’ll be thinking more closely about what each part of the word problem and equation are: Do I know the parts and need to find the whole? Or do I know the whole and am trying to figure out one of the other parts? At home, continue building fluency when you can with subtraction problems - “If I have five and I take away (subtract) three, how many are left?”
Second graders wrapped up Topic G this week. We did more practice exchanging 1, 10, and 100 dollar bills and learned more about their place value. That concept carried over this week as we continued to practice exchanging bills and determining how many $10 bills are equal to $1000. Next week we will dive into how to compose and decompose numbers using place value disks.
Critter Corner Update!
Thanks to all of your amazing donations, Shadow and Mr. Fuzzy Cheeks are in pretty good shape with their supplies for the next few weeks. If you still want to send something in, you can - small things like chew toys are good. Thank you, thank you again! They are two happy little piggies.