Happy Birthday Isa!

Today we enjoyed another fun birthday celebration in room 8!

Me On The Map Project

Well we finally finished up these important projects today.  They TOOK FOR EV ER were a labor of love. :)  Each child created a flap book showing their special spot on the map.  We started with their house on their street, then their city, county, state, country, continent, and finally them standing on the world.  Phew!  So many important map skills were covered in this multistep project.  Everyone worked so hard to complete their Me On The Map Project and I am very proud of the effort put in!

Feel free to come check them out in room 8.  I should get them up on the board in the next few days. :)

Happy Birthday Keenan!

Today we celebrated another wonderful birthday!

We also started new math centers with a fun camping theme!

S'more Place Value
Base-ten block graham crackers, standard form marshmallows, and expanded form chocolate.
All we need now is a campfire!

Odd and even marshmallow roast!

 

Trekking away on IXL. :)

1, 10 and 100 more and less RV's.
Thank you Mrs. Cote for being such an awesome help during math centers!

Base "Tents" War and a little painting???  Because that's how we roll in room 8. Ha!

James and the Giant Peach

Oh boy have we ever been enjoying this fantastic novel!  To accompany my read aloud during class we have been really diving into the book with some fun activities.  Here's what we have been up to!

Of course we had to make some art to kick off our read aloud. :)

We then discussed James the main character and wrote down his character traits in the beginning of the story.  Our hearts were bleeding for poor sweet James... :(

Then we compared and contrasted his two terrible aunts!

Next we created a story map.  We must read on to find out the solution, or as one second grader said the happy ending. <3

In math we were learning about graphs and fractional parts, soooo I just had to tie it all in.  First I demonstrated fractional parts by cutting into some juicy peaches.  Then  I gave each kiddo 4 peaches.  Our mission was to cut our peaches into halves, thirds, and fourths.  We kept one as a whole.

Next we taste tested peaches and peach rings and collected our favorites in a venn diagram. 

A juicy fun time was had by all!

Happy Birthday Bijan

Today we celebrated another special birthday! Yippee!

Book Boxes

Oh.my.word!  The book boxes turned out to be fabulous!  The students LOVE them and they are now all stocked up with good fit books for our Reading CAFE time.  We have been working hard to build our reading stamina and today marked a special milestone for us in room 8.  Today we read for a solid 20 minutes without breaking our stamina!  Hip hip hooray, we met our goal!  I am so proud of the students for diving into reading this year!  It is sure to be a year a great growth.  We have even learned how to take AR quizzes to monitor comprehension after reading a book.  My teacher heart is bursting with joy for my little readers!

Happy Birthday Nyla

Today we celebrated a special birthday and had our first art class!  

What a great day!

Word Study and Fluency Folders

Word study is well underway in room 8!  We have been working on regular short vowel words and the powerful magic e.  For starters we learned how to do word mapping.  I forgot to snap a picture of this, but basically we finger spell the word first, write out our sound markers, spell the word, and then finally swoop our fingers under the word and read it.  So...if the word is fist, we begin by counting out the sounds on our fingers /f/ /i/ /s/ /t/ four sounds so fingers go up.  Then we make four sound markers on our white boards ___ ___ ___ ___.  Next we say the sounds again and write down the corresponding letter (or letters) for each sound /f/ /i/ /s/ /t/.  Last we swoop a finger under the word and read it, spell it, and read it again.  And that my friends is word mapping in an a nut shell, a super effective researched based method for learning to read and spell. :)

For reinforcement and practice of our skills, we created short vowel books during reading centers.  For this project kiddos read through decodable books to hunt for words that have short vowel sounds.  They then recorded their findings and illustrated a few on each page.  They finished up the book with a word sort and some thoughtful sentences.

We also learned how to play a fun and engaging game called Kaboom!  For this game I loaded up some empty Clorox cylinders with popsicle sticks that had our short vowel and magic e words written on them.  I also included a few sticks with the word Kaboom written on them to make the game really fun!  The students took turns pulling a stick out of the cylinder and read the word to their partner.  The partner then tries to spell the word.  If they spell the word correctly, they keep the stick, if not, it goes back in the cylinder.  Play continues until someone pulls a KABOOM stick!  Then they have to put all their sticks pack in the cylinder and start over!  Ha! So very fun!  This is a great game to play at home to practice the spelling sounds we are learning.  It's fun for the whole family!  :)

In addition, I am happy to announce that Spelling City is now up and running! (Just in the nick of time!)  I hope you all found the instructional paper I sent home in the homework folders today.  Please let me know if anyone has any troubles getting in.

While we are on the topic of word study... I thought I would give you a preview of what the kiddos will be finding on their desks tomorrow morning...FLUENCY FOLDERS!  I am super excited about these helpful little guys!  The Fluency Folders will house high frequency word lists, word lists that reinforce our spelling patterns, poems, short decodable stories, and soon our guided reading books.  My plan is for Fluency Folders to go home and come to school each day so children always have them at their fingertips to practice.  We will practice reading in our Fluency Folders 5-10 minutes each day in class and I ask that the kiddos do this at home each day as well.  Becoming a fluent reader is oh so important because it frees up cognitive space for comprehending the text, which is the reason why we read.  :)  Fluency gets better with strategic practice, hence the idea behind our Fluency Folders.  I even included a white board and a marker which can be left at home and used for word mapping practice at home.

So that pretty much wraps up our word study for the week!  I hope you found this informative and helpful.  Please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have questions about
 spelling in second grade.