First off, a very brief recap of Literacy Week (March 11-15). We had an awesome assembly from children’s author Julie Lee. She read us her book “Broccolipunzle: A Fractured Fairy Tale” and talked to the students about how what makes them different makes them powerful. We spent the whole week focused on reading (our class got VERY excited about putting a leaf on our reading tree–we read more books that week than ever before!) and writing. We loved it!

Continuing the reading theme, this past week the schoolwide reading support groups were changed. Many students in our class were added to reading groups. This means that you may start receiving emails from Ms. Jamie or Ms. Wendy or getting small books sent home to practice with your student along with instructions. Please take the time to read with your student, either those books or doing the Dyad Reading program I posted about earlier (linked here). As always, please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Last week we had a teacher work day and the Lower Elementary team has started to collaborate on aligning and improving our curriculum structure for next year. Many of the lessons and content will be similar to years’ past, but we are working to organize the flow of our lessons and work together better in order to provide a more cohesive structure. I am VERY excited about the changes that we are making and am looking forward to next year already!

In the classroom, one of our highlights this week was the lesson on communication as a fundamental human need. Prior to this, we had discussed physical needs like food, clothing, shelter, defense, but we have started to move into non-physical needs. First we discussed what we thought life would be like without any form of communication. It was eye-opening for the children to realize how much we rely on communicating with each other to survive! Then we listened to the phrase “I love you” in 60 different languages so they could hear how differently people communicate around the world. Finally, we watched a video about the Navajo Code Talkers and how their unique language and willingness to serve their country was a major factor in the US victory in the Pacific Area in World War II.

We made two-layer clocks with our younger students to learn both hours and minutes and I have already seen great improvement in their ability to tell time! They move the hands on their clock to mimic what they see on our classroom clock and then are able to fold down the hour tab to see the minutes. I have linked a similar project here if you are interested in replicating this at home.

Thank you again for all you do!