Ringing in 2015!

Woohoo... a five-day week!  We got so much learning accomplished this week!  Take a look to see how we've started 2015 in Camp Second Grade!

We're learning how to make connections to help us have a deeper understanding of the texts we read.  We kicked off this unit by free associating with words.  After reading a word or short phrase, students drew or wrote the first thing that popped into their heads.

In math, we have perfected 2-digit subtraction.  This is really hard - it's hard to remember to borrow when the bigger number isn't on top.  We practiced this skill by playing a Scoot game - students "scoot" around the room to answer as many problems as they can in a given time.

We are learning about landforms in science.  We're visiting famous landforms all over the world to learn more about them.  We're creating a passport containing all of the places we've learned about.  First up was the volcano Mt. Saint Helens.  Did you know it once erupted for over 3 years straight?!

Veteran's Day

We had the day off, but we celebrated a little early in our classroom.  For homework last week, students and their families made a list of family members and close friends that have served or are serving in the military.  We then made a graph to honor our veterans.

Red Ribbon Festivities

We had a wonderful Red Ribbon Week!  Everyone pledged to stay drug free and healthy their whole life through!

Frankly, we have better things to do instead of drugs!

All decked out in red for Red Ribbon Week!

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!