January 15th, 2009

Dear Parents and Guardians of Amigos Second Graders,

We would like t is to wish you a Happy New Year!  We hope that you and your family had a restful school break.  We are happy to inform you that your children have returned to our classrooms happy and eager to continue with their learning.   We have noticed significant growth in them since the beginning of the year.

As we had mentioned in our open house, we would like to plan a couple of field trips and we are requesting a volunteer to help us coordinate them.  If you are interested, please speak to Corinne.

We would like to share with you our plans for the next couple of months.

Language Arts:  We will be reading books related to math, science and social studies.  The following themes:  Self and Others, Liquids, Soils, What is Equality and How can an individual work for Justice?  In addition, in a contextualized and integrated approach we are developing spelling patterns, verb conjugation, singular and plural and gender agreement. 

Writer’s Workshop:  We will be looking at the six traits for writing.  The elements are:  ideas, organization, voice, word choice, sentence fluency and conventions. During the first quarter, we have established writing workshop routines and began working on ideas, organization and voice.  In the next few months, we will turn our attention to word choice, sentence fluency and conventions with the final goal of publishing children’s original personal narratives.  In the spring, we will be looking at other genres of writing such as letter writing, poetry and research skills. 

Reading Buddies and Amiguitos y Lectores:  Students have enjoyed the partnership of their Harvard University Reading Buddies and Amiguitos y Lectores on a weekly basis.  Guests visit our classrooms and read on an individual basis with our students. We will resume the visits at the end of January. 

Health: We use “The Great Body Shop” Curriculum supplied by the Health and Physical Education Department to frame our lessons.  The next couple of units are:  “Babies and How you Grow”, “Drugs are Dangerous” and “Germs, They Make You Sick”.

Math:  We continue to reinforce word problem solving skills and shortly we will be starting the Data Analysis unit.

We appreciate your continuing support and hope that you can assist us in organizing our field trips and a family breakfast. 

Sincerely,

Luisa, Silvia, Corinne and Pat