Mrs. Danford's Weekly Update

Dear families,

I m so excited to return to the classroom and start this year. I know how challenging it is to start the year with a sub, so I want to take the time to thank you all so much for going on this journey with me this year. Being home with my new baby has been so wonderful, but I am ready to get back to the work that I love so much.

For those of you that don't know me, allow me to introduce myself.Hi! My name is Alaina Danford and I grew up in Loveland, CO. I graduated from University of Northern Colorado in Greeley, CO in 2011 with a BA in Elementary Education. This will be my 11th year teaching. I love teaching 2nd grade!

• 11/6: Picture Retakes
• 11/10 CAPS Program starting

Beginning November 10th we will be participating in the CAPS (Child Assault Protective Skills) Program. This program is designed to teach children skills that will help keep them safe from potentially harmful situations. The program will cover the following topics:

• Basic Safety- how we feel when we are safe/unsafe, listening to our instincts, and telling trusted adults when something doesn't feel right.
• Stranger Danger- learning how to make decisions to protect themselves with strangers, learn assertiveness skills, strangers on the internet, and internet safety.
• Touching Safety- Learning the difference between safe and unsafe touching, unwanted touching, the touching rule, and the No-Secret rule.
• Bullying/Internet Safety- talking about what is safe to share on the internet, and how bullying can happen on the internet (cyberbullying) as well as safe and unsafe secrets.

If you DO NOT want your child to participate in this program you need to let me know via a Class Dojo message by Monday. If you DO want your child to participate there is nothing more that you need to do.

Monday -STEM Lab

Tuesday - Library

Wednesday - PE and Music

Thursday - Music and PE

Friday - Art

Don't forget your reading logs! We will be creating our new goal for the month.

Please remember to return your yellow folders every Monday.

New spelling words were sent home in folders and are also listed below. Please take some time during the week to work on these with your kiddos. I could really tell on this last test that a lot of you have been doing this. We had some great results!

Next week in SEL we will continue with our topic of Gratitude. We will discuss how a picture shows gratitude, we will identify traits in ourselves that we are grateful for, we will play connection games that involve gratitude and the things that we are grateful for, and we will start our peace circle practice that we will continue throughout the year.

Next week we will be working on the spelling patterns with the lone u sound.

This week's new high frequency words: again, below, carry, does, eight, find, house, laugh, mother, school

Past high frequency words: good, many, near, off, people, right, that, two, under, very, about, see, she, try, said, me, play, look, here, because, after, before, call, do, earth, father, give, her, know, large, after, with, saw, of, he, like, little, no, of, this, to we, with, have, is, jump, my, one, put, the want, what, you, a, can, and, come, are, for, big, go, has, I

This week's new spelling words: music, menu, January, few, rescue, cue, use, cute, huge, cube

Previous Spelling Words: pie, tie, child, kind, sky, dry, high, lime, light bright, float, toe, roast, broke, globe, going, both, grow, bowl, throw, these, need, queen, clean, leaf, happy, funny, key, piece, thiefApril, play, blame, stay, cake, mail, chain, paint, break, great, go, we, den, no, she, napkin, dentist, problem, open, silent

Next week in literacy we will be working on how authors connect events in their writing with sequence words, summarizing and synthesizing text, looking at points of view and how they are presented by authors, distinguishing between important and unimportant information, and identifying main topic and key details.

This week we will be working on collective nouns, action verbs (past, present, and irregular), and using context clues to determine the meaning of words.

Next week in writing we will be working on writing an informative/explanatory essay. We will be using text sources to gather facts and details about a topic, organizing the information we have collected about our topic, introducing our topic, and developing our topic using the facts and details that we have collected.

This week we will be learning about the levels of local government. we will take what we have learned to sort the jobs of local government into different teams, we will sort the different responsibilities of government into the correct levels, we will reflect on what we have learned and discuss what level of government we would like to work in, and we will create a class list of each level of government and what their responsibilities are.

This week we will be practicing solving subtraction problems using the strategies we have learned, solving one and two step subtraction story problems, critiquing solutions to subtraction problems using reasoning, reviewing what we have learned tis unit, and taking the unit test.

Laurene Edmondson Elementary School

Email: alaina.danford@tsd.org
Website: https://www.classdojo.com/invite/?c=CJAR8W4
Location: 307 West 49th Street, Loveland, CO, USA
Phone: (970) 613-6323