All Aboard The Polar Express

What an amazing adventure we had on The Polar Express!  I absolutely love seeing the kiddos creativity and imagination shine through this wonderful experience.  Thank you one and all for making this special day possible.  This is a magical memory that will be treasured.

Contraction Surgery

Today we became surgeons and operated on words!  We have been learning about contractions for the past few days and today it was time to put our skills to practice and perform contraction surgery.  Our "doctors" worked in teams to cut apart words and put them back together to create a contraction.  Of course we had to use surgical masks, gloves, and bandaids for the apostrophe because, well, what fun would contractions be without a little drama!?  I followed up the lesson with a little quiz just to be sure my doctors could graduate from medical school and move on to great future endeavors (like recess!) and I am proud to say they all earned 100%.  Looks like a little drama and role-play sure makes learning stick!  Oh and we had a ton of fun too!

Rudolph and Clarice

I just love the personality that shines through these happy reindeer!  After drawing their reindeer, our sweet second graders used watercolors, chalk, and sharpie to make their masterpiece come to life.  LOVE!

     

Our Week in Math

We have been chugging away on multi digit addition this week, and I am so proud of the kiddos success in this key math concept.  Not only are they learning how to problem solve in several different ways, but they are learning why our standard algorithm works and that makes me oh so happy!  I was only able to snap a few quick photos as the kids were at recess (probably because I was elbow deep in Crisco. Ha!), but here's some of what we have been up to!

Look "Who's" Learning About Shapes!

We've been learning about shape names, sides, angles, and vertices.

Ordering large numbers from least to greatest.

Figuring out place value riddles!

Matching standard form numbers with expanded form and word form.

Skip counting by 2's, 5's, and 10's

Holiday Lights

It's beginning to look very festive in room 8!

Our little cuties wrote sweet acrostic poems telling what you might find them doing over the holiday season.  I love that the students wrote a phrase and not just a word for each letter and the bright pop of color is so happy in our room!

Happy December friends!

Nonfiction Text Features and Polar Bears

All week we have been learning about informational text features as well as polar bears as we worked our way through a 13 page book.  Each page highlighted a different text feature such as caption, cutaway, fact box, illustration, map, glossary, table of contents, and so on.  We learned so many new and very important vocabulary words to add to our reading tool boxes.  This unit was very meaty and I am proud of our second graders hard work!  After becoming polar bear experts the kiddos wrote fantastic paragraphs about these amazing animals.  

Then the kiddos painted and drew some beautiful art to go with it.  

you tube- how to draw a polar bear.  LOVE!

To top it off we made "polar bear paws" to feel for ourselves how polar bears stay warm in the freezing arctic waters.  I wrapped students' hands in Crisco (fat) and dunked them in ice water.  This experiment totally worked and was such a concrete way to learn how the polar bears thick fat is so important for the icy conditions of the arctic.  

We have learned so much with this fun unit!

Elves For Hire

Have you heard that the North Pole is looking for quality elves to work this Christmas season?  Well, a special a notice arrived in room 8 this week, and we learned that Santa is looking for hard-working, direction following, creative elves to join the team!  There were three open positions; toy design, gift wrap, and cookie baking!  Each kiddo filled out a job application and created a list of characteristics that made him or her qualified for the position.  Then we reviewed our author's purpose lesson from last week and decided we needed to write a persuasive letter to Santa convincing him to hire us as the North Pole's newest elves.

Next we put our creativity to work and created bubble maps telling all about our elf selves.  We used this information to write an informative paragraph to include in our application letters.

Last but not least each student wrote a fun story to entertain Santa.  It was a ton of writing and I am so proud of the second graders hard work and determination to cover each of the three purposes for writing that we have covered; persuade, inform, and entertain.

Meanwhile, each student "elfed themselves"!  Talk about a cuteness overload!

We later used these little cuties to practice our measuring skills and measured our elf clothes using centimeters.

I'm am honored and proud to introduce you to the North Pole's newest elves!