We're Living Like Pilgrims

As promised, here is a snippet from our days prior to Thanksgiving Break which will from now on will be known as Pilgrim Days! 

 

Our week began with a special visit from our dear friend Mrs. Tumney who retired last year from her position as Lena Dunn's sweet and helpful librarian. Mrs. Tumney came and read a Thanksgiving story to the class that really made us use our predicting skills. 

Our class also took a virtual field trip to Plimoth Plantation in Plymoth, Massachusetts. During our Science/Social Studies block throughout the month of November, we had spent our time learning all about the pilgrims' voyage from England to America. We learned that there were actually two ships that left the England harbor (the Mayflower and the Speedwell) and that the Pilgrims had to spend two months aboard the Mayflower - oh and we also learned what a chamber pot was used for! The students even graphed the weather at Plimoth Plantation verses the weather in our own hometown of Washington for our field trip day. I'm telling you, we packed it all in!

The day of the field trip, the students were given tickets to board the Mayflower and boy were they excited! They listened intently as we learned what life was like for the pilgrims at Plimoth Plantation in 1627. The sweet little "pilgrims" took notes and then we broke into small groups to discuss new things they had learned. 

Next, we got to shaking and made some homemade butter (hence the recipe cards your student brought home that day) and tasted it on some crackers. Each student was allowed to record on a chart whether or not he/she liked the butter and then we graphed our results during our math block.

Our day ended with pilgrim games that are believed to have been played by pilgrim children such as tic-tac-toe, a form of hula-hoop, ring toss, and riddles. I leave you with some fun pictures of the "pilgrims" in action...

I hope your family had a fabulous Thanksgiving Break and are enjoying the anticipation that the Christmas season brings!

We're in the Double Digits!

Over the last month, our class has ROCKED in math! We have covered two digit addition and are currently mastering two digit subtraction with and without regrouping. As always, I feel like the students grasp ideas better when we can use our hands, so to help them out with the concept of two digits we used work mats. For several days in a row, we utilized the math work mats which encouraged the students to physically carry the digit/number tile over to the tens place when adding two digit numbers like 43+29. They really enjoy learning in partner groups and I love when they work in pairs because they get to demonstrate understanding, cooperatively correct one another, and re-teach by explaining their reasoning to their peers. In the end, learning concepts like two digit addition and subtraction becomes concrete for the students and the whole time they are having fun!

Also, before we took a break for Thanksgiving, we covered a story in our reading books called Ah, Music! We spent the week studying vocabulary words like vibration, volume, performance, tune, and concentrate. At the end of the week, we were privileged to have Mr. Wright as our special guest who brought in instruments such as a guitar, a snare drum, and maracas to illustrate the week's vocab words. When all was said and done we not only knew our vocabulary words, but we also walked away with a new tid bit of knowledge: the snare drum is the loudest non-amplified (meaning you don't have to plug it in) instrument. 

Stay tuned for the next post which will highlight our classroom's Pilgrim Day!

We are Authors!

If you recall in the month of October, your child came home one day with a sticker that said, "Ask me about the book I'm writing!"

As part of our Writer's Workshop, and because I had been introduced to an amazing classroom publishing company called Student Treasures that transforms students into published authors, we dove right in to the whole writing process. Rough drafts, illustrations, everything that goes into writing a book was covered in our writing block and we couldn't wait to receive our final, published copy. Well...they came in this past week and to celebrate we had a special Author's Tea and Book Signing.

As a special treat, I created a video so that you can see your student autographing our classroom book.

If you missed out on the chance to order your own copy of our classroom book, contact me and we'll get you an order form.

Blog Blast

Due to the lack of recent blog posts one might think that we're still on Fall Break, but that would be entirely untrue. Our class has been B-U-S-Y, busy! So in an attempt to catch you up to date on some things we've been up to over the past four weeks, I've decided to give you a blog blast. Here are five amazingly, awesome events that have taken place in our classroom:

1. We had a new reader of the week! (It's actually a reader of every two weeks because we trade off with another grade, but nonetheless it's a pretty cool reward to receive!)

Mr. Diego!!
This guy loves to read books about weather!

2. We are learning how to type our spelling words in a Word document! This is helping us learn and practice our spelling words and it is also teaching the students excellent computer skills that they will need later on in the upper grades. 

3. The iPads!! We have used the iPads in our math station rotation (their favorite app is Sushi Monster which is helping them to become quick and fluent in their math facts). We have used the iPads in our literacy station rotation (our high school librarian, Mrs. White, tapped in on THE best online library app called EPIC and it lives up to its name!). We have also used the iPads as a spelling station to help us with our weekly spelling lists! The opportunities to utilize the iPads in our classroom seem to be limitless and the students absolutely LOVE when it is their turn to learn with the iPads!

 4. We developed our Writer's Workshop rubric which is basically a way for the students to be able to grade or assess their own writing and it gives them a goal to shoot for. To help the students first understand what a rubric was, we discussed ways we could "grade" the appearance of our desks and made charts of characteristics of a Clean Desk (or a 3 star desk), a Pretty Clean Desk (a 2 star desk), and a Not So Clean Desk (a 1 star desk). Then the students went back to their desks and did their best to make their desks look like a 3 star desk.

P.S. It helped that we did this project the day before Parent Teacher Conferences!

 After creating a rubric to grade our desks, we then transitioned to a rubric for our writing and the students were better able to understand the purpose of a writing rubric. Take a look at the students discussing and then the examples they rated so that they would know what an A writing piece would look like (or a 4 star), a B writing piece (or a 3 star) and so on..

5. Our classroom pet for a week - the jellyfish! You can't see him in this picture, but trust me...he's in there!

Two weeks ago our story of the week was Jellies: The Life of a Jellyfish and the students enjoyed sharing what they already knew about jellyfish and then recording what they had learned. The sweetest moment that week was our "jelly group" time. Here are some pics of the students researching jellyfish in their jelly group time...

And now you can consider yourself blog blasted! Whew! It has been a crazy few weeks since returning from Fall Break and here we are already two weeks away from Thanksgiving Break. Have a great weekend and keep on encouraging your children to read and practice their math facts!

iLearn with iPads!

I hope that by now you have heard about our class' amazing gift we received through the generosity of some fantastic donors - 4 iPad minis! The class had no idea I had applied for this project through an organization called Donors Choose and as you will see, they were super surprised! Watch the gift reveal here.

Obviously, the addition of the iPads to our classroom has been warmly welcomed by the students. They have enjoyed being able to access our online reading program Raz-Kids on them, as well as play a phonics Bingo game on them during our morning Literacy Stations. 

But that's not all, the iPads are also a part of our daily math station rotation and every week each student is allowed to utilize the iPads to assist them in learning their math facts. These little gems of technology are an amazing asset to today's education and learning, and we are super thankful to have them as a part of our classroom!

And the countdown continues - seven days until Fall Break!

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!