We know that the transition time back to school can be hard. Early mornings again. Making lunches. Picking out what to wear. We know that settling back into the routine of school can be a challenge. We hope that in the 6th week of school, you are feeling a little more settled and that routines are starting to feel normal.

As you send your student to school, we know how important it is for you to know that your child is safe - emotionally and physically -, learning, and happy. We try to accomplish this with the incredible work our teachers do every day, through sending home class newsletters, and through our work with school culture. As a parent myself, these are the things I want to ensure for my own children as I send them to school each day.

The relationship you have with the school is important and we want everyone to know that we strive to ensure that caregivers know we are working to ensure all students are learning, that they feel safe, and they are happy and growing.

This year, we are continuing our work with RestorativeDC/SchoolTalk to improve our schoolwide Restorative Justice practices. If school is for learning, and about building community, in order for our students to be good citizens someday, then we must teach children how to repair harm when it happen, and how to discuss situations openly and honestly. Negotiating conflict is an important life skill. Our students report that their biggest source of conflict and feelings of lack of respect at school comes from peer to peer interactions. We believe that this is due to the lack of skills necessary to engage in conflict in ways where all parties can grow, learn, and preserve their dignity in the learning space.

We have partnered with RestorativeDC/SchooTalk as they support schools with learning practices to support whole school culture. The pillars RJ are: recognizing harm and needs, making all aware of their obligations; and engagement.

With our students, we have established school rules for the year. We believe that developing rules with students creates more student buy-in, holds students accountable to themselves and their peers, and focuses on positive ways of being in community, instead of a list of what we can't do. Our rules this year are:

Respect Yourself

Respect Others

Respect our School

We look forward to sharing our RJ journey with our community!

I know I have heard it before, "Thats not how I was taught math". Yes. For most of us, we were taught to memorize our multiplication facts, how to regroup across numbers, and to follow certain procedures for division. We were taught using a lot of formulas and procedures. However, math is a process, a way of thinking, a set of skills and way of recognizing relationships. Teachers now are teaching these skills and how to apply this sense of math to tasks. Accuracy is still important, but we must remember that math is not just the procedure, but how we are thinking about the relationships between numbers and operations. Why is it so important that when we think about numbers, we can recognize the value of the digit i the different places? Place value is the basis of our number system and it affects how we solve and reason for accuracy in math tasks.

Our 5th graders are exploring place value and the relationship between digits when moved on place value charts, and what this means when understanding whole numbers and decimals. It can look confusing but this practice and these tasks are developing a deep understanding of digit values and how place value affects every operation. Believe me - it's important to know that when a 4 is in the thousands place, that is different from being in the thousandths pace.

We know that sometimes it's hard to get up in the mornings. We get it. Please note that students who arrive after 8:45am are marked tardy. If a students is tardy or absent, even if you contact the main office, you will still get an automatic notice from DC Public Schools about your child's attendance. These alls do not come from that school. We know they can be frustrating. If you believe that your child's attendance was not recorded accurately, please first reach out to the teacher. If they cannot help make a correction, please reach out to Ms. Braddy to get the attendance record corrected.