What a Trip!

About seven years ago (okay not really, but it has been nearly a week and a half ago), our class went on our very first field trip as second graders! Thanks to the Jasper movie theater, each student was given a great deal on a movie ticket to see Dolphin Tale 2, a box of popcorn and a drink all for $6!

The students were so excited because we had spent the days leading up to the field trip watching Winter (the name of the dolphin in the movie) on the live web cams at Clearwater Marine Aquarium. Your family can watch from home by visiting here.

Needless to say, the students both enjoyed the movie and our roadside picnic afterwards. Here's a glimpse into our time together:

 Can you tell it was super, duper hot?!

A big shout out goes to parent chaperones Kelly Fields, Blair Stinchfield, and Shelby McDannald for coming along and helping as well! And while I'm thanking people, I'd also like to thank each and every parent that has a student in my class...you guys have done an AMAZING job raising such FABULOUS children. They make my job super sweet! 

And one more thing! Today, our librarian came in and announced our class' "Reader of the Week" and it was.....drum roll please......

Miss Haddie!

Every week a different reader from our class will be chosen and I will do my best to post the exciting information here on the classroom blog. 

Thanks again for letting me have the chance to teach such excellent students and please, please, please keep on supporting your student!

And just because I'm keeping count - Fall Break is only 10 days away!! We can do this!

Introducing...

Remember a few posts back when I shared a bit about our classroom's Writer's Workshop time? The students love, love, LOVE this portion of our morning and groan (not kidding) when I say, "Let's wrap it up writers!"

Well, I'd like to introduce you to a new aspect of our writing fun...

THE AUTHOR'S CHAIR!!

To most people it would simply look like a black chair with the letter A and other words painted on it and donned with ribbon and green tulle. However, to the students in our classroom, this chair is a huge compliment to their writing. Here's how it goes down...we open our Writer's Workshop time with a brief (about 10 minute) mini-lesson and then the students are told, "Let's go be writers!" and they return to their seats and begin their writing. While they are busy being authors and getting the chance to practice the six traits of writing (Ideas, Organization, Voice, Word Choice, Sentence Fluency, and Conventions), I travel around the room and conference with the students about their writing. Then, with about five minutes left, I use our code phrase, "Let's wrap it up writers!" and the students clean up their materials and meet back up at the carpet to hear who has been chosen to sit in the Author's Chair and share their piece of writing. It's a super big deal! And, what they don't know is that Mrs. Wright has a clipboard keeping track of who and when each student has been chosen to sit in the Author's Chair just to make sure that everyone gets a chance to be affirmed in their writing skills. 

This past week we introduced the trait of Organization. We learned a song to help us remember that every good story/piece of writing must have a beginning, a middle, and a strong ending and we visualized the order using a train image, like this:

To help the students practice organization in their writing, they were asked to write about how they get ready for school each day and to specifically use the words first, next, then, and finally. They rocked it and even used some fabulous describing words/phrases like, "I zoomed to the bathroom..." They are amazing writer's and I'm pretty sure that a popular children's book will one day be written by one of our very own classroom authors! 

To finish up this post, I would like to share some pics of two of this past week's students chosen to sit in the Author's Chair!

Diary of a....Eeek, a Spider!

This past week our class enjoyed reading the story Diary of a Spider by Doreen Cronin, who also wrote the books Diary of a Fly and Diary of a Worm - great stories!

Not only did we read the story Diary of a Spider, but we also spent a considerable amount of time learning about spiders, especially the jumping spider.

We learned that spiders have eight legs and also eight eyes (which tied in great with our math lesson on doubles). We also learned that a jumping spider is only 1/2 inch in size but is able to jump 20 inches. And the grossest thing we learned was that spiders do not chew. Instead, they insert their fangs into its prey (say a fly for example) and they insert a poison that turns the fly's insides to a soup which the spider then sucks up with its mouth.

Eww, yuck!

And after all that research we got our craft on and created these darling spiders that are now "hanging" in the hallway.  Here's some pics of the students hard at work:and their finished projects on display.

We have decided that the spiders are the perfect classroom pets for now, which was a great way to introduce our next story in our reading books called Teacher's Pets! Your student will be bringing home their reading book on Wednesday night to read the new story to you - happy reading!

Readers in Training

Ugh. Sorry I'm a bit late in getting this post up, but that long Labor Day weekend was a real treat! I hope you all enjoyed some mornings sleepin' in and some seriously sweet family time as well!

I wanted to let you in on a little secret...

Shhhh, we have to be very quiet when we talk about this. 

Our class has been in training for a marathon of sorts, called Reading Stamina. Every student in the class has their very own book box which they fill every week with five books that they choose from the classroom library. This is a great time for students to select books that really interest them and you would be surprised at how many science, weather and aquatic animal books are chosen every week. 

Then, every day during our 90 minute reading block, we have our stamina time. Perhaps this is where I should insert a quick review of what stamina is. Here is the poster that is hanging in our classroom that explains why we do what we do during Reading Stamina: 

And that is our goal. On the second day of school we set the timer for two minutes and we read quietly to ourselves without any interruptions, and when the timer went off we marked the time down on the board. The next day we challenged ourselves to three minutes and succeeded! 

Stamina - doing anything for a long period of time without getting tired or giving up. 

These students are definitely not giving up! I'm so excited to share that as of today our class Reading Stamina is at thirteen minutes! And for an extra treat, here are a few pics I snagged last week of the students reading during our stamina time. 

Enjoy!