Hold On to Your Hats and Glasses...

For the wild ride of the holidays is upon us! 

Oh my, my, my a lot has happened since I last posted!  

Here is a little window into our sweet world of learning. 

Let's see, where to begin??? Well, we had an awesome jogathon last week and raised a lot of money for our school!  The kids and I loved having King Kirby drop by our class each day.  He taught us to stick together, say thanks, go big, and find our strengths.  Our second graders really took these lessons to heart and are still applying these concepts regularly.  In fact just the other day as one kiddo zoomed out to recess without cleaning up, pushing chair in etc., the others that were still in the room said let's GO BIG and take care of this little mess.  We are definitely an extreme team that sticks together in room 8!  

After the fun run we put our fine motor skills to work and started in on our turkey mosaic art projects.  I think they turned out to be pretty spectacular! 

We also wrote Fall poems and sweet notes to our classmates.  

We had a really good time learning that author's write with a purpose and good readers know how to identify the author's purpose when reading.  We used the acronym PIE for author's purpose; Persuade, Inform, or Entertain.  I shared three short passages with the students and our mission was to identify the author's purpose and find clues in the text that supported our reasoning.  The passages were written by dogs, which made identifying the "doggie's purpose" super engaging and fun! 

Next we made our own author's purpose PIEs to solidify our understanding and use as reference tools.  Then we read books with buddies, sorted them according to the author's purpose, and wrote a reading response journal to share with the class.

Throughout the month we have been working on several wonderful projects and many of them came home yesterday along with the turkey mosaic in a sweet pocket with your favorite little turkey's handprint on the front. ;)

Thankful Writing Project

Informational text about a Pilgrim's Life

Pilgrim Boy or Girl Thanksgiving Writing Project

Turkey in Disguise

Skip Counting Corn

 Yesterday our talented second graders put on a delightful performance of The Turkeys Go On Strike!  Then we celebrated with a special Thanksgiving feast.  Thank you so much wonderful parents for making this memorable event possible.  I think everyone really enjoyed it!

We also celebrated another sweet room 8 birthday! Happy birthday Mateo!

 That wraps up a few highlights from the last two weeks.  

I think it is safe to say learning is fun and memorable in room 8! 

Wishing everyone a very special and restful Thanksgiving.  

I am so thankful for my 21 precious little turkeys!

xo 

Our Week in Math

We have been working hard and trying our best in math this week!  Since we keep our math centers for at least two weeks, we get pretty excited when we bust out new center activities.  On Tuesday we got busy with these fantastic new centers.  Thank you Mrs. Cote for being my right hand gal every Tuesday.  We love having you in room 8 for math!

Two of our centers centered around counting coins.  I am so impressed by the kiddos knowledge and understanding on this topic.  We sure have sharp mathematicians in second grade!

Students gathered coins and then stamped out different combinations to equal exactly $1.00.

 They also drew out coin combinations to equal certain amounts.

Another center focused on fractions using chocolate.  Yum!  Students took Hershey bars and created fractions to represent 1 whole, 1 half, 1 third, and 1 fourth.

Next the kiddos skip counted either forward or back by 2's, 5's, 10's or 25's.

We also practiced our problem solving skilled with a logic problem about squash.

We are still chugging away on IXL.

Last but not least, we created Fraction Pizzas!  After dividing our pizzas into eighths, the students took a custom order from a classmate.  Next they got busy creating a pizza to match the order and then wrote about what they created.

A Recap of Our Week

This week was all kinds of crazy for me!  I think my head is still kind of spinning from Halloween, or it could quite possibly be a sugar daze from all the candy I've eaten.  P.S. Kolde family the pumpkin seed brittle is delicious!  Thank you!

But back to our week in review!  Here is a little recap, however, I noticed I don't have many pictures so I will post those next week.

We have been studying the long a spelling patterns ay and ai.  Here is a fun video with a catchy SONG.

We wrote opinion paragraphs telling which community was our favorite and why.

We learned about compound words and cooked up a little recipe book.

We wrote fall poems and created beautiful fall leaves. Pictures to come.

We practiced measuring to the nearest inch.  That's what those broom sticks are that came home on Friday.  Ask your second grader how many feet and inches are in a yard.  Some broomsticks are unfinished because well, our week was busy busy!

We completed our first problem of the month.

We did math wearing our mad science hair because scientists need to be sharp mathematicians.

And we did MAD SCIENCE! 

We created magic foaming spiders and watched them bubble and fizz when placed in a vinegar bubble bath.

We made poppin' pumpkins.

We had fun with franken worms and dancing raisins.

We had a hair raising time with spooktacular static.

We learned about solids, liquids, and gases with our mystery monster brew.

We had a blast with dry ice.

We tried our first STEM challenge and built marshmallow towers.  This was HARD!  We learned that scientists have to have perseverance and problem solve when things don't work out the first time.

What was everyone's favorite part of this week?

Happy Halloween!

What an awesome week we had friends!  Thank you to every one of you who made it all come together it was so special for all of us in room 8.  A very special shout out to our wonderful room moms and their talented crew!  Our party was absolutely perfect!  I was totally exhausted by Friday night, but it was definitely worth all the energy.

So, this just might be what I looked like when I got home.  Super girl down...

Here is a little FLIP of our Halloween fun because that's just about all the energy I can muster up this morning.  I plan to post about all the wonderful things we did this week a little later (maybe after one more cup of coffee:).  Have a wonderful Saturday!