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!

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!

Once Upon a Time...in Writer's Workshop

Wow, it's so hard to believe that we just finished our third week of school! Absolutely crazy! 

This week I wanted to give you a glimpse into our Writer's Workshop time.

 Every morning we have a block of time allotted to Writer's Workshop and I am not kidding when I tell you that the students get excited when I say the phrase,

 "It's Time for Writer's Workshop!" 

This past week during our writing time, we brainstormed all the things that the students knew a lot about - here's a peak at our brainstorming session:

As you can tell, these sweet darlings know a lot about a lot of things! I learned so much about the students from this activity, like what movies they like to watch, what video games they like to play, and the newest sports car craze.

After we brainstormed together as a whole group, we chose clip art or images to represent each of the different topics and ended up with this sweet Topics Chart that the students now have in their Writing Folder. 

Allowing the students to participate in creating their Topics Chart really helped give them ownership and an invested interest into Writer's Workshop. To finish up our week of writing, the students were allowed to choose a topic from their Topic Chart and write to their heart's content. 

Just look at these authors!

I tell you - I am absolutely spoiled by these second grade sweeties! 

They are top notch stuff. 

One last item I need to mention is Box Tops. Our class is collecting Box Tops and have our hearts set on winning the classroom competition for collecting the most Box Tops, so please send in your stash from those cereal boxes and apple juice containers. This coming Monday, August 25th, is when we will turn in this month's collection and we still have room in our collection bin for more. 

Thanks for supporting our amazing school!

Reading is OH, So Sweet!

This week was so much fun and again flew by fast as we began our first story in our reading curriculum - Henry and Mudge by Cynthia Rylant. We voted on which pet would be a good pet and then graphed our results and it turns out more of the students would prefer to have a cat as a pet rather than a dog (we even had a few students who voted on a snake as a pet...yikes!). Also during our reading time this past week, we began what we call Guided Reading Groups which are small groups of students who are led by a teacher or a teacher's aid to help with the five components of reading, which are:

• Phonemic Awareness - or in other words knowing our letters and their sounds
• Phonics - which is the blending of letters together to form words
• Vocabulary - knowing and being able to explain the meanings of words 
• Comprehension - understanding the sequence and story elements of a story, and
• Fluency - which is how smoothly and quickly a reader is able to read

Here are a few pics of our second grade sweeties participating in their Literacy Stations which follow their Guided Reading Groups:

And before I sign off for today, I just have to post a quick pick of the class getting serious about their reading in the computer lab. We are deep into Raz-Kids which is an amazing online reading program that helps students develop in all five areas of reading that I mentioned earlier. The students love this site - I mean they LOVE, LOVE it! Anyhow...we were in the computer lab this past Friday and it was so quiet that I just had to capture the moment because sometimes, let's face it, those moments of silence are rare. Check out these sweet readers, and you can check Raz-Kids by clicking on the link to the right of this blog page under "Sweet Stuff"!