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.