Off to a great start this year!

I can't believe we have finished 3 weeks of school. We are off to such a great start. We have been settling into our routines nicely. We have a special helper Miss Jessica who comes everyday to our class for about 40 minutes to help our class. The students love her her and she is doing an awesome job. We are very thankful for all the help she is giving us.
Daily 5 is going very smoothly and we have been enjoying reading, listening to reading, reading to someone, and word work. We will add work on writing soon. I am excited to be introducing the students to blogging soon and we will be connecting with some other classes with our blogs.
We also absolutely love our ipads and will be sharing lots of projects on our blogs also. Be sure to check back each week to see what we have been up to and what we are learning in class.  The students will be helping me write some posts on this blog next week during our writing time.

It's a new school year and we are learning lots

We had the ipods/ipads this past week and had quite a bit of trouble connecting to the internet with the ipods to work on our project.  We will still continue to use them some but not as much as previously planned since there are many complications. Hopefully we can find some time to finish the project we started last week. We learned about Main Ideas and Details while reading and writing throughout the week.  In Science we studied Monarch butterflies and migration. We were so excited to see our caterpillar become a chrysalis within 2 days of having it. We also learned a little a firefighters as part of our reading and Social Studies.

Dr. Seuss Day

Friday was Dr. Seuss's birthday. We read lots of different Dr. Seuss books and learned some interesting things about him. We enjoyed retelling The Lorax story and staching ourselves. Check out our kid blogs to see our picture with our retelling. This past week we didn't do a story in our reader but did lots of comprehension activities with Charlotte's Web. This is a classic chapter book that all second grade teacher read to our students ever year. We finished the chapter book and did a comparison with Sophie's Masterpiece. This next week we will have a pajama day and watch the movie.

Digital Learning Day

We reviewed making predictions through some tall take read alouds this week that had to do with weather. We also predicted who will win the Super Bowl. The highlight of the week was digital learning day where students help create ideas for a 1 minute video, took photographs and video and screen shots of learning activities that are happening in our classroom.  This is now on our class website and the school website. Here is a link to the video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=frUE1QipS2Y&feature=mfu_in_order&list=UL
We started Junior Achievement with an introduction to our teacher Rob Johnson.  Students had fun asking him lots of questions about what it is like to be a police officer.  Next week he will start with our 1st lesson.  We worked a little on some science videos that we will hopefully finish next week.  We started temperature and telling time in math.  We have been tracking the temperature and will hopefully have time to do some interesting thermometer experiments with Science next week.
Another busy week in Second Grade.

Non fiction text features

Students were learning about non fiction text features this week. We learned about titles, headings, index, glossary, captions, bold type and diagrams. They impressed me by finding these features in lots of books throughout the classroom. We leaned about Chinese New Year and found out what Chinese animal we were. We also had fun writing and saying Chinese numbers. We counted more money in math and spent a lot of time working on polishing our subtraction facts. In Science we experimented with the magnetic poles of magnets and found out magnets can attract through solids, liquids and gases.

101 Day and more

 This past week we continued to review reading comprehension strategies; compare and contrast and cause and effect.  We practiced more counting money and addition and subtraction in regrouping in math.  In science we did a little experimenting with magnets.  We also started working on writing a story which will be submitted for the Reading Rainbow contest. (deadline is March 30, 2012)  We will write, type, and illustrate our story here in the classroom. 

Our 101 day was lots of fun.  We made dog ears and collars with our dog names on them.  We read and wrote a Dalmatian poem which we are still trying to finish publishing on the ipods. We read about dalmatians and played a few fun activities on the computer.  We used money to make 101 cents in different ways, we estimated and rolled dice to 101.  For our snack we had dog bones, Scooby Doo dog treats of course.  It was a fun and memorable day.

Busy Weeks at School

The past two weeks have been very busy in our classroom.  We have been working on cause and effect and comparing and contrasting in reading. We have been studying Force, Motion and Gravity in Science the past 2 weeks.  We did some fun experiments.  We have been on counting money in math.  We have been counting half dollars, quarters, dimes, nickels and pennies.  Last Friday we had a fun RAH RAH reading celebration.