Our Social/ Emotional Curriculum

November 4, 2016

Dear Parents and Guardians.

I hope that you had a good week and that Halloween and its aftermath were not too crazy at your house!

Field Trip

A huge thank you to everyone who helped with the field trip. The students were interested, inquisitive and well behaved. We will continue to draw on the experience as we learn about history, our state, and Easthampton. Did you hear about the millstone that we saw?

The Social/ Emotional Curriculum and Second Step

This seemed like a hard week emotionally for a lot of students! We are working hard to figure out how to cope with frustrations, upsets, and hurt feelings. My goal for the students is to learn how to respect each other and resolve conflicts. My dream is that our class is a tight, collaborative community. We are working on this during morning meeting by modelling kindness and respect with sharing and greetings. Most Friday greetings are “appreciation” greetings where students appreciate something they have noticed or admire about another student. We also discuss different social issues, like what to do if your friend doesn’t want to play the same thing as you or how to show responsibility. We have been attempting some group building games and I will keep trying, but we have a lot of work to do! Additionally, we are going through the Second Step curriculum which teaches students about how to empathize with others, how to listen, and how to cope with big emotions. This week we talked about difference and how important it is to be kind to people who are different. We brainstormed what you might say if someone is teasing someone else for being different. Lastly, our reading, writing, and vocabulary curricula rely on pair conversations so we talk a lot about how to listen, how to express yourself clearly, and how to be a peer coach in writing. You can support this social/ emotional work at home by supporting your child to brainstorm solutions to social problems, modelling your thinking about social situations, and helping them to have strategies to calm down in the event of big emotions. If there are social issues that I should know about, please let me know.

Math

We are taking a math quiz today on multiplication, divison, the commutative property, and the distributive property (the concepts behind these properties). I will send home the quiz for you to look at, sign, and send back to go in your child’s portfolio for the year. You may have noticed that the homework looks different these days. I prefer how this work shows helpful models and builds incrementally on student understanding. I hope you are finding it more straightforward too. Feel free to send in a note to let me know your thoughts.

Sharing Next Week

Next week will be another book recommendation sharing, so students should bring in books that they love from home or the classroom to share. As we are focusing on stories or narratives in class, we will stick to that. I have noticed that a number of students abandon longer books before finishing them, so I am trying to encourage sticking to one book and making it through -- even long chapter books!

Have a nice weekend,

Jessica Harwood