Welcome to Indian Summer!!!

After all the rain we've had the last few weeks, the sun is a welcome relief. We've been getting in as many outdoor activities that we can. Our second grade classroom is enjoying the last little bit of nice weather we may have. In science we're focusing on leaves and parts of trees and have had a safety lesson from a short health unit. We had the Jersey Community Hospital Volunteers teach us some proper handwashing techniques along with doing the "vampire" cough. (That just means coughing into the crease of your elbow instead of your hand).

We have just wrapped up a unit in our language arts unit called "There's nothing like Baseball." As the world series ended late this year, it was a perfect counterpart to our story. We talked a lot about baseball and other team sports. We each wrote a story extolling the virtues of our favorite game or sport.

With the completion of this unit we wrapped up part 2 of 6 in our series. We also completed unit 3 in our math series as we built on our skills of coin exchanging, telling time to the 15 minutes, weights and measures and working on a new challenge called frames and arrows. We look forward to building even more on these skills as the year progresses.

Next week we will begin more Thanksgiving related activities. We will also talk a lot about Veteran's Day as we plan to celebrate it with a day off Wednesday. The class is also very excited about "worm week". We will begin our study of two different kinds of worms. Common earthworms and mealworms will inhabit our class for a few weeks as we watch them wriggle and eat.

Columbus Day at WHE

WHE students had a shortened week due to the celebration of Columbus Day on Monday. The students in our class worked on a few projects pertaining to Columbus and talked about his voyage to the Americas. Our weekly literature theme centered on animal rescue as we read our mai selection "A Habor Seal Pup Grows Up."

We moved into a new section in our math series. We have been discussing new ways to improve our subtraction skills. It's great to see students whom struggle with traditional subtraction methods "switch on" when a new method is introduced.

Our science unit took us on a planting adventure. We planted bean seeds in egg shells and will follow the progress of each seed as they mature. Every three days we will unearth a seed and check the progress.

WHE celebrated Jump Rope for Heart this week as each class jumped during PE time on Thursday. Our rainy week kept PE activities inside as we watched the skies for a change. With the weather turning to fall, we look forward to some leaf experiments next week and will start a new unit on community helpers in our reading series. Spelling and handwriting skills continue to improve in our class as we learn more difficult words.

The class Halloween party is coming up and we look forward to parent/teacher conferences soon. I hope all the parents are prepared to see the great work their second graders are doing.

Rainy Week at WHE

Fall weather has hit Northern Greene County in full force. The rain settled in early on in the week and stuck it out until Friday. Our reading, science and social studies units all coordinated this week to bring together a multitude of lessons on planting, growing and harvesting.

On Monday, the entire school (in two shifts) rode to Jerseyville to see the movie "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs". It was a great day as we all had popcorn and soda and enjoyed a great time with all of the staff. The movie only cost each student $1.00 as Greene Gables, The White Hall Lions Club and the Mansfield's covered a majority of the expenses.

Our reading series covered a great Eric Carle book "The Tiny Seed." We also worked on placing a sweet potato in water that will grow a vine. Our science series focused on plants and their components. The class discussed roots, leaves, stems and flowers. We plan on continuing this study next week and make a poster about how plants grow.

Our math unit focused on some new skills in weighing and measuring. We were able to use some of our new skills in centers as the class estimated and weighed almost everything in our room.

We finished our week with an assembly from the White Hall Volunteer Fire and Rescue Department. The class really enjoyed going through the smokehouse and shooting water from a real fire hose.

We look forward to discussing Columbus day next week and starting a unit on animal rescue. One of the most interesting stories we will look at is about the rescue of a harbor seal pup. We hope to have a speaker come and talk about some local animal rescue projects that exist right here in our community.

There will be an elementary school dance at the high school sponsored by the North Greene High School Band. Many of the students attend this event and it is a great start to a long three-day weekend.

Fall Weather Highlights Busy Week

We have had a very busy week at White Hall Elementary. We started the week off with a bus evacuation drill and received our mid-term report cards. We finished the week with a well attended open house with several students and parents attending. We have fourteen students in our class and 11 students were represented. We showcased some great work from each student and talked a lot about writing and reading progress.

We have just finished our first unit of six in our Language Arts Curriculum, Treasures. Our main selection this week was about a girl named Yoon who immigrated to America. Our week consisted of spelling words, vocabulary words, and supplemental stories about coming to America.

We learned some great new math skills this week. We have been spending a lot of time on "double" facts and how to improve our skills with some shortcuts that make sight addition a part of our math skill set. We had the opportunity to do some painting in the Audobon tradition with Mrs. Winters and Mrs. Painter. We learned about Audobon and painted some blue birds.

Next week promises to be an exciting week. We have an all school field trip on Monday to see "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" at the Jerseyville Theater. We will also have our Fire Awareness assembly and smokehouse tour on Friday.

The students have done very well on their spelling this week. Over half of the class scored a perfect 15 out of 15. Keep working on that spelling!!!

With the weather changing our recess time has included coats and jackets. We had one day of inside recess because of rain but we have had a great time enjoying the fall weather.

WHE 2nd Grade Field Trip

Our annual field trip to the Prairieland Heritage steam show was today. The rain held off and the whole class had a GREAT time!!! We wrapped up our fifth full week of school with this exciting tradition.

This week is also North Greene's Homecoming week. The district celebrated all week with blue and white in abundance around our districts schools. We made it home from the field trip just in time to see the Homecoming parade. This event is always a lot of fun with school spirit at its peak. The High School marching band, football team, cheerleaders, and floats travelled through town and culminated at our playground. Midterm reports went home this week and the students are doing a great job. We have had several writing assignments over the last few weeks. We have written about firefighters, made posters about Alice the Fairy, and wrote a personal introduction to our new Principal, Mrs. Sorensen. The class is doing a great job with writing and making strides every week.

We've been looking at our local history in a little more detail. We're planning an activity book filled with White Hall details and hope to instill community pride in our second grade class.

We look forward to finishing our first of six units in our reading series next week. It's great to see the progress each student is making. Our class has several procedures in place that make our day run very smoothly. The class voted to name ourselves the Cheetah's. We've been having a great time taking pride in our class identity.

With fall on our doorstep, we plan to dive into some exciting science lessons next week. We'll start discussing fall plants and try to grow some different varieties in our class greenhouse. We also look forward to the jumprope for heart drive that we have just started.

Welcome Back !!!

Welcome back !!!

We had a great first week at White Hall Elementary. We jumped right in to our reading series with a story called "David's New Friends". It's a story about a boy on his first day of second grade. It really went well with our first week of "new".

Our class has 14 students. Eight boys and six girls. We are doing a great job with our procedures of entering and leaving the classroom and transitioning from activity to another. I am very impressed with each one of the members of our new class. I can tell that this is going to be a great year!!!

We started our math series, Everyday Math, with an exercise in daily routines. We really had fun exploring our new math tools and we're looking forward to writing to 1000 next week. Two of the skills that we will work very hard on this year are place value and answering extended response questions. We will alternate Friday math times between math games and extended response questions. We hope to get these skills under our belts soon.

We spent our social studies/science time studying the history of White Hall. It was really fun to look at some of the old pictures of our town and school and compare them to our town today. We hope to continue this study over the next few weeks with Greene County Days and a special trip to the Annie Keller statue.

We'll have more news and hopefully some pictures next week. Have a great Labor Day weekend.

Reading Series Comes to a Close

Our first year with the M-MH reading series "Treasures" is ending. Our students have made great leaps this first year and we only see great things in the future. We have really grown used to the reading series and look forward to next year. We hope to put all of the information we have gathered into use. We have just read about African-American inventors. (A picture of George Washington Carver is included). We are about to start "Babu's Song," a story about a young boy in Tanzania.

Our class readies for the second and final field trip of the year. We will be heading to the Illinois State Museum in Springfield and a meal at McDonalds. I'm not sure which part of our field trip is more exciting to our students.

We have been working on earth science and we were able to see a volcano last week. We have also been studying seasons and weather in a bit more detail. Our math series has taken us through a few days of multiplication and division. The class is really picking up on these concepts. They are realizing that we have been building to this all year. We look forward to some great activities during the last few weeks of the 2009 school year.

SPRING IS HERE !!

It has been a few weeks since our last blog. We have been very busy with our reading series and many new math activities. Our second grade music program is scheduled for next week and we are busy preparing some great songs. Mr. Hauk, our music instructor has been doing a great job keeping us in line. Look for pictures of our upcoming program on the WHE website.

We are at the very beginning of a great stretch of good weather. We really look forward to outside recess and letting some of our winter energy out. Our reading series has taken us on an adventure in the desert with "Dig, Wait, Listen". We have been reading "Push Up the Sky" this week as we learned of native American culture and how to write and read a play. Our writing has also been based on play writing. Our new reading series really invites the students to challenge themselves in different formats.

Math has been really challenging. We are starting fractions. We have spent two weeks on fractions and we look forward to a unit test this week. We've been talking a lot about pizza and cake this week as we see how to divide up food in fractions. We are all glad that we do math right before lunch.

We are also busy preparing for our annual Family Read Night. It will be March 26th at 7:00. This is a great time to share the love of reading with your child. Plan on attending.

Wild Weather at WHE

Wow, just last week the temperatures were below zero and the snow covered our playground. The temperature at WHE hit 60 degrees today and we were able to go outside for recess. The weather man must have known about our upcoming unit in language arts. It's titled "Super Storms" and deals with weather and climate changes around the world.


We will connect our science unit to the reading unit and talk about the sky and weather. We have an interesting "tornado tube" that will allow us to see up close the action of a tornado. We are really looking forward to our visit from young Abe Lincoln next week. We have learned all about Abe's presidency and Mrs. Winters came to our class to discuss the photographs of President Lincoln. What a great way to celebrate the 200th birthday of our 16th President.




In math, the introduction of fractions is causing a little friction. The "fraction" concept is something that is developing in 2nd graders but we are becoming more proficient daily. It is really neat to see the "light bulb" go on when a student really gets it.

Don't forget the PTO first annual pancake and sausage supper tonight. We have held a chili cook-off in the past and this is a great change to bring some new life to the activities at WHE. Next Friday will be a school improvement day and we will be dismissing at 11:30. If you haven't visited the school this week, we have a new security system in place that asks us to "buzz" in the front doors. It's fun to see progress in our school district.

Snow Falls on WHE

We have had a very snowy week at WHE. Snow covered the school and roads and we settled in for a great week of learning. Our weekly reading theme has been Animal Survival. The snow really helped us get into the spirit as we discussed how animals could survive in such cold weather. The book "Goose's Story" kicked off our week. It is a great award winning short story that deals with an injured goose and how we can help.

This week was also the kick-off for our new Social Studies unit in China. We all had a great time learning the culture, geography, and art of this country. The Great Wall was of special interest to the class as we looked at several pictures of this 1,500 mile long structure. Mrs. Little does a great job of organizing our week and we were able to have a great celebration on Wednesday. We tried all kinds of Chinese food and were able to "practice" using chopsticks. We had a great time as we celebrated the Chinese New Year.

Math is taking another great step. We have started working on division. It's another skill that we are adding to our list. We are building on our mulitplication skills and have come a long way learning abour arrays. This is an exciting time as the second graders grow each day. The reading series is taking us on an exciting journey as we look at helping planet earth next week.

BRRRRR!!

Wow, It's been a while since I've posted a new blog. A lot has happened at WHE! We had a long 2 week Christmas break and finished a unit in our reading series. Our last day of school 2008 was a snow day. We celebrated with our belated Christmas party on Tuesday January 6th. The class enjoyed some great treats and had a great party with Christmas songs and a gift exchange.

We jumped right back into the school year with a unit on a dance school in New York. We are currently in the middle of a great reading unit centered around the book "Click, Clack, Moo: Cows That Type". It's a great Caldecott award winning short story that the class is really enjoying. All of our vocabulary, spelling, and phonics skills are centered on that book.

The cold weather isn't slowing down our math skills. Our new unit is really heating up!! We have started doing three digit addition and some subtracting of tens and ones. It is really a challenging unit that develops a lot of growth in our math skills. The calculator is an important tool in our new unit. We are learning and using many new skills.

We are also studying the moon and its phases in science. We did a great experiment in the all purpose room with the entire second grade class. We had the entire grade sit in a giant circle - we turned out all the lights - and had a light hit a ball in the middle of the circle. The grade then drew the phase of the moon from their perspective. We plan to post these along the hallway to show all the phases of the moon from crescent waning to gibbous waxing.

We moved our class room around over break and now have a dedicated reading center and writing center. The new quarter started this week along with a few schedule changes. We now have a writing block just before lunch that will focus specifically on a weekly writing skill. Last quarter's schedule placed writing just before dismissal at the end of the day. We are now focusing on a center for the last half hour. We will have a reading, listening, writitng, and computer center to close our day.

Report cards go home this week and the class is doing great. Our "Response to Intervention" plans are progressing. This ensures that all of the students get all of the help they need to grow and develop. I am really looking forward to what this great class can do!