September | 2025 | Second Grade with Jaja

Upcoming Dates to Remember:

Thursday, October 2nd: Yom Kippur, school closed

October 13th: Indigenous Peoples’ Day, school closed

October 14th: Professional Development for Teachers, school closed

October 25th: LS Halloween Party

Math

As we begin the year, we dedicate ample time to building up students’ growth mindset. Though a strong growth mindset does not only serve students in math, it’s important they feel they can take academic risks that help them blossom as mathematicians. In 2J, we embrace mistakes as opportunities to grow instead of experiences to be avoided.

During the first few weeks of school, we spent time reviewing combinations of 10 through playing a variety of games. When students have a strong foundation in their basic math facts, it supports them in approaching more challenging problems with confidence. From there, second grade mathematicians worked through multiple word problems, translating their computation skills to real world scenarios. Our math curriculum balances conceptual understanding, procedural fluency (computation), and problem solving.

In connection to our work around names in SEL (read more down below), we read Chrysanthemum. In the story, the main character Chrysanthemum loves her name until her peers begin to comment upon it being too long and floral. Through the loving support of her parents and teacher, she begins to re-embrace her uniquely beautiful name. Afterwards, students got to explore their own names through the lens of math. For example, they determined how many letters are in their name and compared that number to the number of letters in Chrysanthemum’s name. From there, the class collected data on how many letters are in each student’s name. Through reflection, students considered the best way to arrange the data to make it more organized. Everyone agreed – a bar graph would make the most sense. Students worked together to create their own bar graphs that accurately reflected our class’ data and took time to analyze what information we could gather from looking at the graph. We are off to a great start, and I can’t wait to see how the class continues to sharpen their skills!

Social Studies

Throughout the year, and especially as we are getting to know one another, we integrate social emotional learning into the work we do in social studies. Building a strong classroom community starts with getting to know, respecting, and celebrating each person’s identity. We read The Day you Begin by Jaqueline Woodson, and discussed the characters’ feelings about being different from their classmates. The students shared thoughtful insights throughout this story and were excited to hear how the characters found their sense of belonging by the end of the story. As a way to help the students get to know each other better, students in 2J conducted friendly interviews. The students took this activity seriously, and afterwards were able to share some interesting tidbits they learned about their partners! Most recently, students took this work further by creating Venn diagrams with a partner. After answering a series of questions and having meaningful discussions, they compared their similarities and differences- a great exercise in understanding and appreciating one another.

We talked about how names are part of people’s identities and how it is important to pronounce peoples names as intended by their namers. To reinforce this idea, we read the book Your Name is A Song by Jamilah Thompkins-Bigelow. After hearing the story, each student had the chance to share their own name, to be clear about how it should be pronounced, and to have their classmates repeat it back.

Students are continuing to develop body awareness and are learning how to set and respect personal boundaries. Recently, we read Personal Space Camp by Julia Cook — a humorous story about a child who doesn’t yet understand the concept of personal space and also happens to be fascinated with outer space! The book cleverly introduces the idea of a “space bubble” to help children visualize and understand personal boundaries. The students enjoyed talking about when and why peoples’ boundaries might vary. For example, a person’s space bubble might be smaller when they’re with family members and larger when interacting with friends at school.

2J recently participated in a boundaries activity from IFSEL (The Institute for Social and Emotional Learning) that used red, yellow, and green circles to help students reflect on their personal comfort levels in different situations. For each scenario shared by the teacher — for example, “You’re standing in line and the person behind you is very close,” or “You arrive at school and a classmate runs up to hug you” — students privately chose a color:

Red if they were not comfortable,
Yellow if they might be okay with it, and
Green if they were comfortable.

After making their selections, students turned around to see how others responded. This activity helped kids to check in with themselves and each other about boundaries.

An important part of building a strong classroom community is deciding on class promises. We started this process by encouraging the students to think about their “Hopes and Dreams” for our class for the school year. We read the book Our Class is A Family by Shannon Olsen and talked about how we should all have goals and these hopes and dreams are for us as a group. We then read I Promise by LeBron James, which inspired us to think about the commitments we need to make to help everyone’s hopes and dreams come true. From these discussions, we created a set of class agreements, including ideas like “be kind” and “stop when someone says stop.” To show their commitment, each student signed our class agreement poster as a promise to do their best to follow our shared guidelines.

Language Arts

The beginning of each school year is an important time for students to think about their reading identity. As an extension of their summer assignment, second graders designed bookmarks that highlighted their favorite book, favorite place to read, favorite genre, and favorite character. This helped us learn more about each child as a reader and sparked conversations about reading interests.

A central goal of our literacy program is to expose children to a wide variety of texts. To explore our classroom library, students worked on a scavenger hunt to discover the different genres and series we have in our classroom library.

We also practiced choosing “just right” books. Students learned that a just right book is one that:

Has about 3–5 tricky words per page
Lets them use the strategies we’ve been practicing
Can be read smoothly and fluently
Can be understood and remembered
Is enjoyable!

We remind students that “just right” looks different for everyone. The best choice is a book that fits their reading stage, not necessarily what a classmate or sibling is reading.

More recently, we launched our literacy work groups. In these small groups of 3–4, children rotate between independent reading, working with a teacher, and engaging in activities that connect to bigger questions. This month, students explored:

How can we use different materials to show or describe inclusion?
What kinds of phonics games can we invent and play using these materials?

In phonics, we began the year by reviewing short vowel sounds. Students played a board game to practice sorting words by vowel sounds, and reviewed tapping out sounds, blends, and digraphs (wh, th, sh, ch, ck). We also learned the rules for spelling the /k/ sound (c, k, or ck) and were introduced to closed syllables.

In Writer’s Workshop, we started with journal writing. As a class, we generated a list of topics, and then each child created a “Map of My Heart” filled with memories and ideas to inspire future writing. Students are also working on writing complete sentences. One favorite activity was turning fragments into complete sentences—2J did a fantastic job with this!

Finally, we introduced the writing process with C.U.P.S., a strategy for checking their own work for: