Open House and Field Trip !!!

What a great week to be in second grade. We worked on a great unit in our language arts curriculum called "Meet Rosina". It deals with a deaf student attending a school for the deaf and hard of hearing in New Mexico. It introduced us to ways that we are all different. Many discussions and questions came up surrounding this topic.

We also started working with fact triangles and introduced some multiplication work. In science we continued our work with animals and their habitats. We learned all about the photographer Ansel Adams through our art volunteers, Mrs. Winters and Mrs. Painter.

On Wednesday we celebrated our school with our annual open house. Our class had a great turnout with 10 students and their parents attending. We had the chance to show off our skills with the Promethean Board and our progression in second grade.

Next week we'll begin a new guided reading format for the first hour of our day. Many students will travel to different second grade classrooms for this hour. Many students from other second grade classrooms will come to our room for an hour and we will begin working on some project-based learning activities that will include many of the interests of students. Much of what we will be doing during this time will be student led and driven and I will serve more as a facilitator than teacher. We hope to make the transition from "student" to "learner" and make real-world connections to our work.

Our week culminated with a fied trip to the Prairie Land Heritage Steam Show. We had a great time as we toured the grounds, visited the petting zoo, drove tractors, and rode the mini-steam show. A big thanks goes out to the North Greene FFA who held a very interesting petting zoo with many animals including the fainting goats.

Another Great Week

Our first progress reports went home this week and all of the students have been doing a great job. We've been using our new classroom technology as we learned some new skills in our mobile computer lab on Friday. We discovered how to use drop down boxes, safe searching techniques, saving settings and tabs. We hope to discover many more fun and safe internet techniques next week as we search natgeokids.com next week.

In Science we learned about animal habitats and repotted some of our turnips. Many students took their turnips home to repot there. We left our unit on community helpers and start a new Language Arts Unit based on the story "Meet Rosina".

In math, we completed our first unit and had a unit assessment. We learned a lot about number sense and hope to continue that with an exploration unit with fact triangles and angles.

Getting in the Swing of Things

We've completed our first three weeks of second grade and we are adapting quickly to the procedures of a new school year and a new classroom. Last week we read a great story called "Mr. Putter and Tabby Make Tea". It's a great story about friendship and became the impetus for many great discussions about friends and friendships.

The students worked hard creating friendship cards and developing lists about what it takes to be a real friend. We ended our week with a great trip to "Greene County Days" and were able to learn some interesting civil war facts from General Grant.

We also had a day of AimsWeb testing on Wednesday. This short three story test assesses our students fluency rates and gives us a great starting point to create language arts lessons that are differentiated for each student's needs. It's a great assessment tool that we will repeat later in the winter and again in the spring. These three short probes will allow us to chart the growth of each student as their reading skills progress.

Next week, we'll start a unit on public servants and focus on firefighters specifically. We'll also be discussing animals and their habitats in science. Our math will focus on number sense as we develop some base 10 skills and dig deeper into greater than/less than problems. We'll also tackle the thermometer as we introduce that skill later in the week.

FALL IS ON ITS WAY

We have completed our first two weeks of second grade at White Hall Elementary and the students are settling in to our daily routine. We have many procedures in place to keep us on track and learning throughout the day. We start every day with our morning routine that includes unpacking and unloading in specific areas and then straight to our vocabulary journals where we define and draw a graphic representation of a new word every day. Our vocabulary list comes from a group of words we have identified throughout all areas of our curriculum. Monday we focus on Language Arts, Tuesday is Math, Wednesday is Science, Thursday is Social Studies, and Friday is a mystery word from another area of our curriculum.

The class is preparing for our next Language Arts Unit. We will center week 3 around a story called "Mr. Putter and Tabby". All of the phonics, fluency, grammar and writing skills will focus on the details we find in this story. We've also introduced all of our math routines and hope to get down to some real skill building with a week of math activities that will include number grid work, <,>, and = skills, counting patterns and congruent naming. We have had a great time getting ready to build our math skills.

In Science we are eagerly watching our turnips grow and await replanting into bigger pots. We've been studying the growth cycle of our plants and have been making posters to delineate the seperate parts we might see in our turnips.

Our Promethean board has played a big part in our learning this week. We work with every subject area on our board and have been able to incorporate our language arts with some really fun "flip-chart" tools. The students have a great time using the board and being able to interact with this new technology.