Red Ribbon Week!

We kicked off Red Ribbon-Halloween Week by taking a drug-free pledge this morning.  We then hung them in the hallway for the whole world to see.  By the end of the day this tree and the entire wall surrounding it was completely covered by pledges signed by students from kindergarten to fifth grade!

Check back at the end of the week to see how we celebrated our healthy lifestyles all week long!

Communities Projects

In social studies, we have been learning about communities.  We learned that communities can be rural or urban, need workers, have different places, and need laws and rules.  To cap off the unit, students made their own communities!  Check out all of their hard work!

The Pledge of Allegiance

In honor of Patriot Day on 9/11 and Constitution Day on 9/17, we have spent a lot of time talking about our country in the past two weeks.  On Monday, we spent time dissecting the Pledge of Allegiance.  We were very surprised by some of the words!  When you say the pledge, they tend to run together and you don't even realize that they are separate words!  After that, we worked in partners to come up with reasons why the pledge is so important.  Now we have a new pride in our voices as we say the pledge along with Mrs. Wills every morning.

Predicting the Future (of stories)

We started our first reading strategy last week!  Each month we will learn a new metacogntion (THINKING) strategy.  Our first strategy is making predictions.  Good readers predict what will happen next in the story.  This works with both fiction and nonfiction texts.  Good predictors pick up on clues left by the author.

To kick off this strategy, we took a look at some interesting pictures.  In partners, students then had to predict what happened before, during, and after the picture was taken.  We had some great predictions!

We are Writers!

Every class always has something that makes them stand out... On day 10, I've found ours!  We are writers!  We have learned that Writing is Talking on Paper.  I knew that we'd be good at this... we are quite the talkers!!  I didn't realize just HOW good!  I started with 5 minutes of free writing the first day... then 7... then 10 today... and they just want to write more and more and more!  Looks like we're doubling it for next week!!

We're Underway!

It's only the second week, and we are learning some new second grade skills already!  We're learning about math stations.  In second grade, math is taught workshop-style, much like guided reading.  Students are taught in small groups of 4-6 kids.  The other students rotate through 3 centers:  games, boxes, and number work.  We're learning how to play math games so we'll be ready to do it independently.

Welcome 2014-2015 Campers!

I am so excited for this new school year!  We have had 2 great days so far!  Tomorrow will be our first day with an official schedule - math, reading, writing, the whole shebang!  We're also starting specials tomorrow.  We have music and art!

Check back at this blog often to see what we've been up to in our classroom!