SECOND GRADE

FRIDAY, APRIL 09, 2026

Happy Friday, 2nd Grade Families! Welcome back to The Matrix! We a great time this week easing back, bit by bit, into our class routines. The very first day back, we each were given the platform to excitedly share about our Spring Break activities, as well as put all of our items back into our desks. The big focus this week was on a small art project designed to further enhance self awareness and self reflection. The mission was to draw on a piece of paper what the inside of our minds looked like to us. We were a little fuzzy about what this meant at first, so we did a warm up drawing to gain some traction and ease our nerves. But after that, we all got it, and were off to the races! Everyone put really interesting and telling elements into their drawings, and we're so proud of them. Next week, we're going to title the pictures and move on to part two of the project. The energy was high, the stories were infinite, and everybody was thrilled to be back amongst one another again.

This fun week was punctuated with the return of the mack himself- EASTON!! And just in time to celebrate his birthday too!! Everyone was so excited to have him back, after missing him all week. And, of course, we loved celebrating his most recent lap around the sun. Happy birthday dude!

ELA

This week in Language Arts, we kept it light and simple to begin our return to school. We wrote in our composition notebooks a llittle bit, and we also wrote a shot book analysis from one of the books we've read this week! Our classwide, collaborative book reading contest is fully underway and every single child is having a ball with it. The main Language Arts work we engage with this week was something called "Ekphrastic Poetry" (a phrase they'll learn this upcoming week). This is when you write a poem in response to a provided image. Honoring Arab History Month, the image we were presented was a colorful art piece from Palestinian artist Samia Halaby. The first part of what we wrote was a one paragraph description of the poem in our most expressive words. After that, we had a small challenge of generating 1-2 titles for the piece. To close out this experience, we then wrote a Five Senses poem about Samia's art piece; what does the image sound like, feel like, taste like, look like, and smell like. Everyone engaged, and they came up with some really great poems!

math

This week in Math, we eased back into the swing of things with various math activities! We practiced all of our timestables songs every day, and did some multiplication warm up sheets. We played Around the World; first with addition and subtraction, and then with the multiplication cards. That was really fun, and everybody is getting a little bit quicker with remembering! On one of the days, Mr. Josh (along with some eager beaver student helpers) made piles of 15 pennies to pass out to the class. Starting with using only ten, we were given table group challenges; divide your ten pennies into two groups so that they add up to ten, but everybody at your table has to do it a different way. We did a few rounds of this, and even got up to 15! This was a fun way to revisit the connetion between numbers in our minds, and warm the engines for next week. We also closed out with a little review on rounding, and were even able to round to the nearest hundred! Wow!

4 PILLARS OF WELLBEING

One of the powerful things we do here at TCS is introduce meditation and mindfulness to our students on all levels. In addition to the practice of meditation, we're also focused on building community. We spend time in the morning, after our warm up activity, breathing and meditating to get our bodies aligned and our minds settled into their optimal flow states for the day. We've also incorporated music into this time together. Flow state is essential to life; out of flow state, comes organic evolution.

STUDENT LIFE

"Enjoy the little things in life, for one day you may look back and realize they were the big things." -Robert Brault (although frequently attributed to Kurt Vonnegut)

The school setting is rife with big little moments which can so easily be overlooked. Part of our job as educators is to help the children tune in to these moments in a way apropos to their engagement ability. The concept of "looking back and realizing the little things were the big things" is perhaps too grand in scope to accurately convey to 7-8 year old minds, however, they do know what a good day feels like.

They know what successfully bonding with friends feels like. They know what falling out and then reconciling feels like. They know what the flow of a good day feels like, when everybody is sort of playing off of each other and the room is full of laughter. They know what it feels like to have their space and their wishes respected. They know what it feels like to respect another's space and wishes. They know what it feels like to not be angry at anyone, but also not necessarily feeling like being social. And they know how hollow a big moment can feel when not resting on a foundation of little moments leading up to it.

So, though we may not be able to "preach" the message in the same way we could with adults... through slowing down and redirecting them to these thousand tiny points of connection building in a day, they can learn by bodily instinct what they will one day intellectually internalize.

The little moments are what true meaning is made of.

Happy Birthday Easton!!

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