Happy Friday!

Happy Friday!

We hope you have had a wonderful week!  We had a great week of learning and fun!

Important Upcoming Events

• Fall Harvest Party: Wednesday, October 30 at 1:45 p.m.
• Here is the link if you want to sign up to send in items.
• https://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b0c4fadac28a3fe3-team
• Pumpkin Book Character Due: Tuesday, October 29
• Please send your student's completed pumpkin and their book report paper into school on Tuesday.  We will do a gallery walk on Wednesday to see all their fun characters.  We will post pictures on Twitter.
• Here is the information sheet 
• https://docs.google.com/document/d/1VJFs4pJrdU9-FY6c4cs6jEbP_E1utNeF_zg8Xs-i90w/edit?usp=sharing
• No School: Thursday, October 31-Friday, November 1
• Parent Teacher Conferences: November 4-November 14
• Times will come home next Tuesday.
• Veteran's Day Assembly: November 11

Coats

• Please make sure your student has a light jacket and a winter coat with them at school.  It has been chilly at recess this week.  If the "feels like" temperature is below 44, students need a winter coat. If the "feels like" temperature is between 45-59, students need a light jacket or sweatshirt.
• Some students have asked about borrowing a coat from lost and found, but due to health reasons and all the illnesses going around, we can't allow students to borrow coats/jackets from lost and found.
• If you need assistance getting a winter coat for your student, please let us know.

Friday Folders

• Unit 3 HomeLinks: These are optional practice if students would like to do them at home.  They are not expected to be completed or need to be sent back to school if completed.  They can be used for Homework Bingo activities.
• Unit 5 Fundations Letter:  This gives you information about what students will be learning in Unit 5 of Fundations.  As with the HomeLinks, there are activities students can complete if they would like, but they are not required and do not need to be sent back to school.
• Service Club Food Drive: 2nd grade is collecting smooth peanut butter.  If students would like to donate smooth (please no chunky) peanut butter, they can put it on the tables outside the office or they can bring it to the classroom and we will send it down.

Restorative Practice

• Kate went to Restorative Practice training on Wednesday and Thursday.  Restorative Practice is a program used to help students identify and express their feelings to others and help them with conflict resolution.  The goal of Restorative Practice is to be 80% proactive and community building with 20% of them being reactive, problem solving and repairing harm.  
• The following definition is from the International Institute for Restorative Practice, "The aim of restorative practices is to develop community and to manage conflict and tensions by repairing harm and building relationships. This statement identifies both proactive (building relationships and developing community) and reactive (repairing harm and restoring relationships) approaches."
• A key part of Restorative Practice is Affective Statements and questions.  These states express feelings.  For example: I feel happy when you stand in line quietly.  These help students to identify their feelings in different situations and then share their feelings with others who have harmed them (emotionally or physically).  This is helpful because often students struggle to identify how their actions affected others.  There are also questions that can be used that help students to identify their feelings such as How were you feeling when _________ happened? or How have you been feeling since this situation occurred.  Affective statements can be used at home when talking with your students.
• A large part of restorative practice is holding circles.  Initially, these circles are used to help build community and will consist of low level risk questions.  For example: If you could eat any ice cream, what would it be? or If you won a free trip, would you to go the mountains or the beach?  Once a community has been established and students are more comfortable with circles, we will use them for conflict resolution or to solve problems occurring within our classroom. 
• Mrs. Neale, Mr. Smith and Mrs. Kimble are all trained in Restorative Practice and uses it when debriefing with students after situations occurred.  

Next Week's Learning
*Since next week is a short week, our schedule will be slightly off, but here is what we will be working on.*
Reading

• Our writing is taking longer than expected, so we didn't get a chance to take our reading test this week or start fables.
• Next week, we will do a practice test in groups to learn the format of the Wonders test.
• We will also be reading Halloween books and comparing/contrasting the different stories to look for similarities and differences.

Writing

• The students set writing goals this week.  Be sure to ask your student what his/her goal is and how they plan to meet the goal.  
• We started our expository writing this week.  The students are learning to include transition words as well as topic sentences.  
• We will continue working on this next week with the goal to hopefully get the writing finished.  If we don't get it finished, we will wrap it up the first week of November.

Math

• We are continuing to learn subtraction strategies next week.  We have talked with the kids about the purpose of learning so many strategies.  This allows them to pick the strategy that works best for them when solving a problem.
• Please continue practicing math facts as home.  The strategies are helpful, but as the numbers gets larger knowing the basic facts is helpful.

Science

• We are continuing to compare/contrast habitats.  The students will be doing this in their expository writing as well.  They have to identify the needs of the animal and how those needs are met by their habitat.

Fundations

• We will start Unit 5 next week in Fundations.  This unit covers multi-syllabic words.  The students will be working on syllable division as well as identifying the syllable types in the word.

Have a fabulous weekend!