December Ends

A Short and Busy Week

                        To finish December we packed our suitcases for the last time with all of our Holidays Around the World materials. Their passport and suitcase is full! The students were able to each pick a card from another school from our Christmas Card Exchange, add their trees complete with decorated ornaments from each country, a sparkle poinsettia and Chinese lantern.

The students also packed up their cute reindeer writing. After reading Imogene's Antlers they wrote what they would do if they had deer antlers and mounted this on deer paper they made with their hands as the antlers. They also filled out an application to be one of Santa's deers. We finished on Wednesday with our party before leaving. We will begin January with some New Year Goals.

Can You Buy Me Scoot?

We have been trying to stay on track with our curriculum during this busy holiday season and all the extra activities involved. We have been having fun learning math while doing a "Can You Buy Me?" scoot activity. I tagged old mini-Beanie Babies and then had coin purses with different amounts of change in them. They first had to count the coins and write that amount on their sheet and then see if they had enough to buy the stuffed animal. If they did they circled yes, if not they circled no. Once each student was done, they scooted on to the next desk and started again. They had so much fun counting and working that they wondered when they were going to start math. In social studies we are continuing to travel with our Holidays Around the World and in science we are finishing weather and Earth changes.

Busy December Activities

We have been busy making and receiving Christmas cards from classrooms across the country. We are participating in the Holiday Card Exchange Project from ProjectsByJen. We made our snowman card using the 3 sizes of marshmallows as a stamp dipped in white paint on a bright blue paper tri-fold card. The students love receiving the cards and looking up on Google Earth where the school is located and then information about the class. We then display the cards in the hallway along with a large map and string showing where the card came from for all of the other students to enjoy. We have also been traveling around the world learning about holiday traditions in other countries thanks to Christina Bainbridge's Christmas Around the World. Finally, we have been studying the water cycle in science and just started a money unit in math.

End of November

It is hard to believe that November is almost over. We have been working hard and just finished our Water Habitats unit in Science. In Math we have been looking at numbers. The students are so good at place value because we do this already with our morning calendar routine. They write the number in symbol form, standard, and expanded. We also look at how many days that we have been in school and that is our number of the day. They tell me what one more, one less, 10 more, and ten less is for that number. One student is doing this on the activboard and the rest are using their mini-white boards. We have started a new unit in Social Studies called People Make History. The students have also been busy writing stories. We read The Ugly Pumpkin and then wrote a new ending for the story by thinking of an adventure for the new squash. The students practiced sequencing in their writing by using transition words to write how to cook and turkey. Finally, after reading Turkey Trouble, they had the turkey write a speech why he should not be eaten and what he could disguise himself as so he would not be. It will be a short and busy 2 days before our Thanksgiving break on Wednesday.

Red Ribbon Week and Halloween

What a busy couple of weeks we have had. We dressed up on different days for Red Ribbon Week and ended with a school assembly, which our class sang a Character Counts song. Then, we had Halloween and Parent/Teacher conferences to finish the month of October. One activity that we did for Halloween is a pumpkin investigation. I had great help for this science and math activity from mothers in our classroom. You can view all of our photographs by checking our classroom website 2nd Grade Slueths.

Langwood Education Center Here We Come


We have been studying habitats in science and were able to learn more during our animal field trip to Langwood Education Center with Kathy Dice and John of Louisa County Conservation on Friday. We watched birds in the bird blind, learned about animal tracks and made plaster casts to take home of an animal foot print, played the herbivore/carnivore food chain game, and dug up skeletons and reconstructed them being paleontologists. We finished our day by playing in the leaves before boarding the bus to go home. I am so thankful for the beautiful weather that we had and a couple of fathers that joined us to help. To see more pictures go to our website picture links.

Math Facts, Recycling, and Hermit the Crab

It has been a couple of busy weeks. We have been working on our math facts and the students are doing very well with their doubles and doubles plus one. They love to say "eighteen wheeler" for our  9 + 9 fact poster with a semi-truck. They all made large posters with the doubles facts and pictures to help them remember.

We have also been studying habitats in science. We are working on our flip booklets to add our information to. We are also starting our Scholastic Science Vocabulary Readers during Daily 5 and filling out tri-folds for the books that will help us become experts on many different animals and the habitats that they live in. Thank you to Jessica Winston for the tri-folds. I made some new ones with her blank template for my top readers with the National Geographic Kids books. We will end up putting all of this information together in a display.

This week we were able to visit the Southeast Recyclers. The students learned all about recycling from Professor Garbologist. They are good at picking up trash in our playground and recycling all of our classroom paper. Now they know just how much it does for our environment.

We have a new addition to our room. After hearing the story A House for Hermit the Crab, the Silva children brought in their hermit crab to visit our classroom for awhile. He is enjoying his visit and the children love watching him.

Fred Hatched!

Our butterflies are hatching. We have observed the growth and stages of  caterpillars and one has finally emerged from his chrysalis, that the class named Fred. We released him after looking at his proboscis and giving him a little sugar water for energy. He is now migrating to Mexico where he will be hibernating until time to start on his way back next spring. 


Each student has decorated a life-size, paper butterfly. These tiny butterflies are packed into a cluster and travel to Mexico inside our "class butterfly". The symbolic butterflies build bridges of communication and friendship between children of Mexico, the United States and Canada. The paper butterflies symbolize international cooperation for monarch conservation.  Our class will then receive butterflies next May made by students in classrooms across North America that continues the cycle of friendship and stewardship. We will  be able to track where our class butterfly lands with an interactive map. The students are now writing a story of the life and journey of Fred. This unit has integrated science, social studies, math, reading, and writing. For more information look at the Journey North website.
 

We are bucket fillers!
The students began writing encouraging notes to one another after reading Have You Filled a Bucket Today? A Guide to Daily Happiness for Kids by Carol McCloud. If every student has a note on Friday in their bucket "shoe pocket" then they receive their notes at the end of the day. We keep a checklist in our fun folders with every ones name and boxes to check off for when they write to that friend. They are to write a nice note to each person in the class before they write a 2nd time to someone. They were so excited to receive their first batch of notes. You can find out more on Bucket Fillers and creating a kinder, respectful school at: http://www.bucketfillers101.com/ .

Another Life Cycle to Study

We have been taking care of our Monarch larva. We have found out that butterfly larva eat a lot of milkweed and create a lot of frass to clean-up.  Several of our caterpillars have spun their chrysalises and are in the pupa stage of the life cycle. We have been measuring and watching the growth from our tiny caterpillar starting at .5 cm. In Social Studies we started looking at maps and how to read map keys and a compass rose. We finished our first unit in math on number sense and graphing and we started looking at patterns, adding, and subtracting, along with telling math stories. What a busy week, all of this along with showing off our room for Open House on Tuesday evening.

  Open House
All About Me - Mini People

A New School Year has Begun

We have been busy learning our rules for the classroom and getting used to clipping up and down on our behavior chart. There have been several students that have already made it to Outstanding!!!  Our class started science by learning about the great inventor Thomas Edison and how he kept journals, so we have our own scientific journals "composition notebooks" to document our learning. We have been dissecting seeds and growing plants to study the plant life cycle. They were amazed that the plant in the dark and sand actually grew although the closet plant is not doing very well. We are getting ready now for our open house.

2nd Grade Here We Come!

We have started a new year of 2nd grade with a great bunch of kids. We started off with many beginning assessments that have to be done and then dove right into our read-alouds and writing projects. We first looked at how important our writing is by completing the directions on how to go down a slide. We then went outside to see how many really were able to go down by what was written in their journal. We read 

Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type and tried typing on an old typewriter like one in the story. They learned that typing is important because you can type so much faster than you write with a paper and pencil after having a race between myself and a couple of students. They students then typed a letter to Mr. Graber about their wants for the school just like the cows did to Farmer Brown.