We had a great time finishing on life size skeletons.  Everyone knows the "college" words for the thirteen major bones in their body and can demonstrate in a fun game of Hokey Pokey if  you're interested.  Be sure to ask your student about their phalanges. 

We are busy learning the 13 major bones in our body by using our own bodies and what we have learned.  It is a very exciting, fun filled day of learning and singing.  Ask your child to sing about their bones for you.

Lauren and Sonya sang their way through a reading retell today using their glove and the very important elements of who, what, where, when, and why.  Good job girls.  Next time it would be wonderful if you would tell us what you are sharing like :  I'm telling you about the Who.  Keep reading like rockstars.

 

We had a great time yesterday learning our math facts using our new game called "Quiz, Quiz, Trade.  Ask your student to demonstrate for you and keep on practicing at home.

Room 3 is working hard on their new spelling word.  Yeah - Motivation at this table!!!!

 

Here are the videos for this week's vocabulary.  Your students will be bringing home the QR codes for scanning early this week.  Have fun learning the new words.

 

We are working hard on spelling in room 3.  We are using disco spelling to motivate us.  The music is loud and the many voices shouting their spelling words are even louder.  The great dance moves that are inspired by these amazing spellers are just a bonus.  Be sure to ask your student about disco spelling - or - be sure to tell your parents about disco spelling.  It may teach someone something new and it will definitely bring someone a smile.

k - e - e - p  w - o - r - k - i - n - g  h - a - r - d!!!!!!!!!!

Wow!  Look at our math fact progress.  Everyone is studying hard and making gain on learning their math facts to automaticity.  I am very proud of everyone and I think everyone is going to become a mathematician in second grade. 

Our Math award winners are celebrating their advanced progress of learning at least 10 or more new facts this week and two are now award winners in automaticity.  They can do 64 math problems in 1:36.  That is amazing.  WAIT!!!  It doesn't stop there.  Now they ware working on mastering their multiplication facts so stay tuned as many branch out into new math territory. 

This is so exciting.  Please congratulate your student.  Ms. McGinley is very proud.

Hello Everyone,

I'm sure that your students have already told you about our new math fact fluency project.  We have to be able to do 64 addition and subtraction problems in a minute and thirty-six seconds.  Yes!!!! It can be done.  We have one student very close and many more studying hard to learn their facts automatically so they can quickly write them. 

I sent home a packet on Friday to help your students in this goal.  In their baggie, I placed a timer, a laminated math test, an expo marker for the laminated test, practice flash cards, and yellow sticky notes.  My hope is that students study their flashcards at least five minutes with an adult and then set the timer for 2 minutes and take the fact test.  The yellow sticky notes are so they can write the number of problems and the date.  This all stays in the bag.  If they make improvement on Friday's test, they will get a few more flashcards added to their ring for studying.  I appreciate your help in this endeavor.

This is the window bulletin board that we are using to keep track of our progress.  If a student makes any progress on Friday, they will get to put their name on a piece of popcorn and add it to the bucket.  We are definitely having a good time learning this week in room 3. 

Don't forget to check for updated spelling and vocabulary words.  Have a great week.

We have a short week this week as we celebrate President's Day.  We are reading a funny, fiction, story this week about a serious farmer and what his animals do to make him less serious.  Our spelling focus is /or/ore/our/ this week.  Please check the homework tab for spelling lists if you misplace yours. 

Our focus skills for reading are:

• plot
• compare/contrast
• subject/verb agreement

Our focus skills for math are:

• math fact fluency
• time
• elapsed time

If you have any questions or concerns this week, please do not hesitate to call or drop in.

We celebrated Christmas.  Our Elf on the Shelf brought in a humungous red Santa bag full of gifts for our classroom.  We spent time wrapping our family gifts and then we had some treats and got to open our gifts.  They were so cool we couldn't wait to show them off.  It started snowing in the morning and Ms. McGinley let us go outside so we could be the first ones to put our footprints in the snow on the playground and we got to show off our new hats.  It was a really fun day and we were excited for Christmas break.

 

 

Thanksgiving was a full day of laughter and learning.  We spent a week learning a lot about social studies events and then we spent a day celebrating our own first Thanksgiving.  We wrote stories on animal hide (Ms. McGinley crumpled up brown paper bags and tore them in funny shapes), we made headdresses and decorated feathers. 

We made salt dough beads and painted them.  We could have traded them like the Indians did but no one wanted to give up their beads.

We made cornbread muffins to go with our stew.

 

We made butter to go with our muffins by shaking cream.

and we even made fertilizer with oreos, gold fish crackers, and jelly beans just like Squanto - only ours tasted much better.

 

 

 

We have also celebrated a few holidays together.  For Halloween we decided to leave the sweets at home and bring our scientific brains to school for some really spooky experiments.  We made witches skin, ghost boogers, and goblin guts.  Then we had some healthy snacks of cheese and crackers.  It was an amazing day and we learned a lot about liquids, solids, and tools to measure with.  Ms. McGinley is always sneaking learning in on us.

We recently read several books about music.  We are working on common core standards and need to read 65% nonfiction books.  We have new books in our classroom and we are really learning a lot about things in the world around us. 

We decided to make musical instruments as a wrap up of our musical reading exploration.  We made a really cool music video to thank our donors for the books.  We truly felt like rock stars.  Please watch us while you can.  We are so good that we may be famous singers by tomorrow morning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hK7kjzk8MBQ

We are working really hard in our classroom to increase our reading and math fact fluency.  We are using our I-pads to help us and lots of practice.  Ms. McGinley wrote a grant for new nonfiction books so we have a lot of new books in our classroom.  We love reading nonfiction and taking our a.r. tests; especially when we get a 100% because then we get a bead for our necklace.

 

 

Ms. McGinley wrote some grants and got I-pods for the room and then the district gave our classroom a few more so everyone could have one.  We worked really hard to learn how to use them as learning tools and we did such a good job that they got everyone in our classroom an I-pad to use.  We use them for everything.  We do our reading on them, take reading tests, we do our math and take math tests on them, we do our writing on them for reports and journaling, and we can even take our spelling tests on them.  We use them to practice our skills also.  What we really like to do is make videos for our vocabulary words or book reports and email them to our parents.  Sometimes we take a picture of our math worksheet and then use our finger to write the answers and then we e-mail it to Ms. McGinley.

We were fortunate enough to have four large concrete spaces by the garden area where benches used to be.  Ms. McGinley wanted our garden to be a literacy garden so she painted something different onto every space so that we could take our learning outdoors on really nice days.  This hundreds chart is a lot of fun to use with bean bags and whiteboards.  We throw two beanbags and make and addition, subtraction, or multiplication problem or we act lazy and just walk the numbers and count to 100.  Sometimes we jump across numbers so that we can skip count.  It is easy until you get to your fours and then it gets tricky.

This is the Candyland spot before the pictures were added.  Ms. McGinley has created cards to go with the area.  We have cause/affect, main idea, follow directions, and context clues.  It is a super fun way to do reading on a really nice day; especially when Ms. McGinley remembers to bring her delicious chocolate chip cookies.

This is our free choice area.  We use it to play scrabble with our spelling words and sight words.  Sometimes we get to play checkers on it at recess.  Ms. McGinley said it could be used for chess also, but since she doesn't know how to play...  she can't show us. 

As a classroom art project, we made stepping stones for all the story elements.  We have one for story retell, beginning, middle, end, characters, problem, solution, and favorite part.  The stones are done in mosaic art.  We used marbles, cut glass, buttons, cool glass treasures that looked like turtle, hearts, stars, ladybugs and other cool things.  We partner read books under the tree and then we walk down the path of stepping stones and retell the story. 

If your ever by our school you should stop and wander through our outdoor literacy garden.  You will love every minute of it.

Yeah!  We really had a green thumb because our garden was beautiful last year.  Hopefully we can has as much success this year but with sprinklers that work.  The first year of our garden the school district decided to put in new sprinkler systems so Ms. McGinley had to walk buckets of water out to the garden twice a day.  Wow, it was a lot of work and she is really happy that the sprinklers are now working.  We harvested all of our crops and made a delicious stew with cornbread to celebrate how wonderful it is to be able to come to school everyday and learn with such wonderful opportunities. 

This is our garden after we spent hours painting our raised garden boxes.  The day we chose to paint them it poured down rain and all the paint began to run together.  The next day we put handprints and wrote our names over the now very colorful garden boxes.  Then Ms. McGinley stayed at school all night long painting sealer on them and putting them together so that we could plant the following day.

We are back!!!!  However, we were gone for some really exciting reasons.  We have been busy building and growing a primary garden with literary elements.  We have also introduced one-to-one ipads into our classroom.  I will be posting various pictures to bring us current and then I will do my very best to keep us current.  Second grade is amazing so prepare yourself for what you are about to see.