Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving to my room 8 friends!  I hope everyone is having an delightful holiday.  Mine is full of family time, cozy blankets, and pie!  A much needed time of rest for me.  We were busy as can be in the month of November and I am so proud of our second graders hard work and growth.  Here are a few of our highlights.

                     Turkey handprint art projects. I hope these little cuties become family treasures. :)

Turkeys on strike art and play invitations.

Our first play, The Turkeys Go On Strike!  

I'm beyond proud of our students for doing such an amazing job! 

They learned the entire play in 3 short weeks.  Bravo!

 We wrote fall descriptive poems and wrote kind notes to our classmates. 

 

How cute are these sweet pilgrims?!  Here students wrote about Thanksgiving traditions.

We are thankful turkeys.  Students used the turkey craftivity as a graphic organizer to help organize their ideas before writing a nice paragraph telling all that they are thankful for.

I am so very thankful for each one of my students.  

What a joy it is to work with them each day. 

 My heart is beyond full!

Happy Thanksgiving friends!

Reading Centers

Something I love about teaching is that it is a profession where I am always growing.  While in my reading master's program I spent a good deal of time researching best practices for reading centers.  I have modeled our classroom reading block on these practices and am loving this targeted, strategic, focused reading time.  A huge thank you to all you amazing mommas who come in and make this magical time possible.  We love and appreciate you!  In our class we spend an hour on small group reading instruction each day.  Ideally the children rotate to two centers or stations each day.  Sometimes we only get to one because of a special event happening on campus.  We use the acronym LEARN (which I learned from my dear friend and colleague Mrs. Powers) to structure our rotations.  L stands for listen to reading.  E stands for enjoy a book.  A stands for attention to writing.  R stands for read with the teacher.  N stands for notice words.   The children receive targeted small group instruction at the writing, woking with words, and reading with teacher centers.  Again, this would not be possible without our fantastic parent volunteers. <3

Working with words with our talented student teacher Ms. Berry.

Making connections to text with my last year's student teacher Ms. Fekete.

Focusing on long a spelling patterns in my group. 

Our sweet readers reading away! 

Happy Halloween!

Hope everyone had a spooktacular Halloween!  We sure had fun in room 8!  Thank you to all who helped make this special day a success.  You are so very appreciated!

Check out this FLIPAGRAM 

Pumpkin Book Reports

Wow!  The pumpkin book reports were amazing!  I love to see the characters come to life and the kids love presenting their very first book report.  Job well done kids!  We learned about several super books that are now on our reading bucket list for sure!

Bats, Bats, Bats!

I am so proud of our second graders hard work on our study of these interesting creatures of the night.  We closely read informational text all about bats to gather facts and key information.  Then each student made a bat fact book.  This cute little book then became their graphic organizer to help them write an informative paragraph about bats.  To top it off each student drew a scientific diagram and labeled key parts.  Our kiddos are certainly growing as writers and I couldn't be happier.  They are gaining independence and confidence in their abilities. So proud!

I can't believe this is the only picture I snapped.  I thought I got the students in action.
I guess I need to be sure to snap more action shots!

A Math Snapshot

We have officially finished chapter 2 which covered the foundations of multiplication.  Please be on the look out for your child's math test.  It should have come home last week. :) I have to say I am so impressed with the students' hard work on this chapter.  I was a little apprehensive about starting multiplication so early in the school year, but our kiddos rocked it!  Way to go second graders!  We jumped ahead to chapter 5 and are now focusing on place value.  Here is a little snapshot of some of the math we have been working on in class. 

Skip counting corn. 

Multiplication practice.

Logic problems.

Comparing numbers.

Addition and subtraction fact families.

Place value.

Becoming "living" numbers.

Pumpkin Science

Hello friends!  Wow it has been awhile since I have last shared.  My apologies.  Life has been busy, busy, but we have sure been working away in room 8. :)  Over the last few weeks we have been doing some pumpkin science.  Students worked in teams to investigate both the outside and the inside of their pumpkin.  Then we posed the question, what will happen when soil, water, and sunlight are added to the inside of each pumpkin.  Each student formed a hypothesis, we conducted our experiment, then we patiently waited (only a couple of days) to see what would happen.  Low and behold sprouts grew like crazy!  We have been monitoring our pumpkins' progress each week and writing about the changes seen.  Our plan is to plant our pumpkins right in the ground because they are decomposing and sprouts are shooting out of every opening.  I think we might be starting our very own MATES pumpkin patch!  Please be on the look out for your child's pumpkin science book to be coming home soon.  I'm sure your little scientist will have a lot to share with you.