This week in Language Arts, we spent most of the time using our skills to write our Madam President speeches, and our Chief Advisor short essays! Incoporating our expanding knowledge of how words work, and how they are spelled has been a growth challenge for the class. As we humorously point out- spelling isn't just for the spelling quizzes. We must be mindful at all times when we are writing. That goes for quotation use, contractions, and sentence structure. Although the schedule did not permit us to have the actual spelling quiz on Friday, we did work on our words throughout the week and practice using them in sentences. We've also been practicing our reading comprehension, meeting the question "I read it, but what does it mean/what am I supposed to?" with the grounded accountability question of "well, what do you think it means/what do you think you're supposed to do?" Asking these kinds of questions helps develop a child's problem solving skills- aiding in the resistance against learned helplessness- while also fostering an environment of authentic learning, where they feel safe inquiring about things they may genuinely not know.

This week in Math, we continued practicing our timestable! We've been in a review period, which has been a helpful way to create quicker paths of mental accessiblity for some, and a means of learning/re-learning some of the earlier timestables for others. As a class, we actually hit a huge milestone this week with word problems! We revisited a shopping word problems activity sheet, which we had done twice prior over the span of four months, but THIS time... everyone in the class was able to successfully complete 80% of the problems with little to no assistance, and only needed minimal help with the remaining problems. This is amazing growth and showmanship of their critical thinking skills, which will serve them so well in the third grade. We also revisited Cafe Cafe, and everyone was so much smoother with the flow of their roles and calculating their costs/change!