All About... Mrs. Armstrong and Her Class: Making Progress

In just a week, I will be putting first-trimester report cards into your child's binder to bring home to you. I am working hard to prepare these and as I do I wanted to share a few thoughts with you.

In the fall of 2015, Stormonth began using a new standards-based report card. The criteria listed on these report cards reflect the state academic standards. The standards detail what students are expected to learn and do by the end of each grade. Our report card criteria, too, now reflect what is expected by the end of a year. Our grades - Beginning, Developing, Secure, and Exceeds - refer to student progress toward year-end goals.

Taking this long view of a child's academic progress requires a significant shift in thinking - for teachers and for parents. Traditional report cards indicate what a student has mastered by a specific point in time; the new report cards look at whether the student is on track to meet broader goals that generally encompass a whole year's worth of learning.

As I grade students this trimester, I am assigning Ds for Developing to most students in most areas. To me this signifies that a student is working successfully, growing stronger, and heading toward meeting the second-grade standards. He or she still has some learning left to do, as would be expected one third of the way through the year. While it's possible that a student meets some end-of-the-year standards ahead of schedule and is marked S for Secure, it's the exception.

I was part of a Stormonth teacher team that created our new report cards. The process we used to match standards to report card criteria was at times painstaking and always very thoughtful. After using the report cards for a year, our team met again this fall and made changes. The report card you see next week will feature a tighter format and clearer language than last year's. I hope that the grades you'll see together with my comments give you a good understanding of what your child is learning and doing in second grade.

Now here's an update on our week in the classroom:

Money was our focus in math. Even though the coins we used were fake, the real-world applications for counting combinations of dimes, nickels, and pennies and for adding these amounts made the lessons highly motivating. Most children head into our Unit 2 test next week with these skills solidly in place.

In Reading Workshop this week, we began the challenging work of distinguishing the main idea from the interesting details in nonfiction texts. Nonfiction is packed with information. Some of the information coalesces around a big idea; some of it is unrelated or only tangentially related to that big idea.

These details, however, often capture readers' attention by providing interesting, even quirky, information about the topic. We are working to sift the important ideas from the interesting details - but also to relish those quirky details. We are using magazine articles initially because their length makes this work more manageable. We started with a fascinating Time for Kids piece about Helen Keller. In Writing Workshop this week, all of the boys and girls started writing new books. Our lessons included identifying your audience, writing strong introductions, and writing memorable conclusions. We looked again to our mentor author Melissa Stewart. Her books give us examples of how to do these things well.

Finally, you may have heard that one of our classroom windows blew out on a windy night two weeks ago. I arrived at school to do some work on a Sunday to find the gaping hole. By early Monday morning, thankfully, the hole was covered. Earlier this week, the plywood was removed and our new window was installed - to the great delight of all.