Irrawaddy Inquirer“Once a Waddle, Always a Waddle”

From Mrs. Caid and Ms. Righetti February 23rd, 2020

contact us – Mrs. Caid: kcaid@csaschool.org AND Ms. Righetti: lrighetti@csaschool.org

HighlightsLast week in Irrawaddy we..

● Introduced our kindness bucket!

● Began reading non-fiction books about people!

● Began talking about personal expertise in writing!

● Finished our unit in math talking about addition and subtraction strategies!

● Talked with our learners about ways that we can show respect and responsibility in the classroom!

Important DatesFebruary 18th: 100th day of school spirit wear day! February 26th: Picture retake day!March 23rd: Spring pictures!March 29th-April 2nd- No school spring break

A Glimpse Into Our Week!

Character CornerIn this section of our newsletter, we will share information regarding our character education program including character traits, social protocols, and related concepts like manners. We encourage you to use these ideas and language at home in order to help reinforce and connect it to the classroom!

As we continue our year in the Irrawaddy classroom, we continue to talk about character traits. Each week we find ways to connect these character traits to the classroom, and school as a whole. This week we continued to talk about kindness and how they can show kindness to friends and classmates! We introduced our kindness bucket where they can write down different acts of kindness they see throughout the day. During the month of February we will be making a kindness paper chain with their random acts of kindness! Ask you learner about our kindness paper chain :)

NAV. NEWS!

March is Reading Month!!

March is right around the corner and boy, are we excited for “March is Reading Month”! A few of our favorite highlights for the month of March are having literacy-themed spirit days each week, giving the opportunity for student readers daily, and having a Read-in/Pajama Day to wrap up our festivities on Thursday, March 26. We will also share a “READO” board with lots of reading activities to do throughout the month at home. We look forward to our fun month of reading together and appreciate our teamwork with you in making reading come to life for these children and developing life-long readers. See below for our spirit days and to save the dates now:

Thursday, March 4: Dr. Seuss-inspired! Wear fun socks for “Fox in Socks”, your favorite hat for “Cat in the Hat”, etc.

Thursday, March 11: Dress as your favorite book character

Thursday, March 18: “Readers are Leaders” spirit wear- Dress for what you want to be when you grow up!

Thursday, March 26: Pajama day! More details to come!

Culminating Event!

Be on the lookout for a celebration of your writer’s review writing piece to be posted on SeeSaw in the next couple of weeks! The Navigator unit has been hard at work writing, editing, and revising their review pieces in order to take a writing piece through the complete writing process, and now we get to celebrate their published pieces with you! You will see a post in the coming weeks that contains a recording of your learner’s review piece, as a form of celebration for being able to share their work out with their families! If you have a virtual learner who may have already recorded to share their writing, take some time to reflect with them to highlight their points of pride and having worked on this so diligently. If they haven't recorded their celebration to share their final draft, we'd love to view it!

After viewing your learner’s recording on SeeSaw, please go over the following questions with your writer:

- What was the most challenging part of writing your review?- How did this project help make you a better writer?- What are you most proud of?

We hope our Navigators are proud of themselves, as they all used strong work ethics in order to create this review writing piece. We hope you enjoy their SeeSaw celebration of writing!

In addition to it being “March is Reading Month”, March is also “Music in our Schools Month!” Mr. V is offering opportunities during Music class for students to share a musical talent or interest. It could be

singing a song, playing something on the piano in class, bringing in an instrument from home, doing a dance, sharing their favorite song, etc. This is a voluntary and informal (but prepared) in-class participation opportunity. If your student is hoping to bring something from home, especially an

instrument, please chat with them and their classroom teachers to confirm their “performance” date so that they will be prepared and have what they need for Music class on the correct day. Mr. V will have a piano and microphone available for use, as well as the ability to play a song to sing/perform to. If sending

a video from home is easier, that can be emailed to classroom teachers or to Mr. V directly. Performances will be limited to two minutes and sign up will take place in their regular classrooms. Our virtual learners also have an opportunity to share via a Seesaw or Google Classroom assignment that will

be posted in March. We hope to see lots of kids taking part in making musical connections!

100’s Day Celebration Flashbacks!

Virtual Waddles!