🌟 Welcome to a Joyful Start of the School Year! 🌟
Welcome to an exciting new school year! September has been full of discovery, teamwork, and joy as our scholars settled into our new classroom, explored the building, and became familiar with our daily routines. We’ve made new friends, worked together through fun teambuilding activities, and started building a strong and caring classroom community.
💛 Social-Emotional Learning (SEL)
This month, our focus was on our school core values:
Resilience – We keep trying, even when things are hard.
Intellectual Curiosity – We love asking questions and exploring new ideas.
Joy – We find happiness in learning and in being together.
Integrity – We are honest and do the right thing.
Collaboration – We work together as a team.
Through stories, discussions, and group activities, students reflected on what these values mean and how we can show them every day at school.
➕ Math Workshop
In math, we reviewed different strategies to add within 100, including drawing pictures, making ten, breaking apart numbers into tens and ones, and using the standard algorithm. We also learned how to solve word problems using the RCDW strategy:
- Read the problem
- Circle the keywords
- Draw or write to show our mathematical thinking
- Write an equation to show our answer
Additionally, students collected class data through surveys, created picture and bar graphs, and compared information across graphs to make sense of the data we gathered together.
📚 Reading Workshop
In reading, our class practiced dictating while reading, helping readers find text evidence to support the central idea and author’s purpose. Students are learning to think deeply about what they read and to talk about their thinking with partners and the class.
✏️ Writing Workshop
Our writers have been crafting their personal narratives by zooming in on small, meaningful moments. They planned, rehearsed, drew, and wrote across pages to bring their stories to life — adding feelings, actions, and dialogue. Writers also worked with partners to share ideas and give each other positive feedback to make their stories even better.
🌎 Project Time: Celebrating Hispanic Heritage Month
As a school community, we celebrated Hispanic Heritage Month by exploring the beautiful country of Costa Rica. Our young scholars worked in teams to research and create group posters about Costa Rica symbols, food, landforms, climate, and location. We were so excited to learn the dance from Costa Rica and can’t wait to share it with families and friends!
🔮 Looking Ahead
As we move into October, we’ll continue to strengthen our routines and dive deeper into our reading comprehension skills and math addition and subtraction strategies within 100. We’re so proud of how our students have started the year—with enthusiasm, kindness, and curiosity—and we look forward to celebrating their first published piece of the year in October!