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.
