Turkey Bingo!

We had a blast playing the annual game of all-school turkey bingo!  We even had 1 winner in 2nd grade!  Have a wonderful Thanksgiving everyone!

Fall Trees Art Project

We finished up these beautiful fall trees last week.  I love how the students make this project their own, each looking different and unique to the student.

Making Venn Diagrams

Last week the class learned more about Venn Diagrams by making their own, collecting the data, and answering questions.  Whenever the students have the opportunity to be going around the classroom and asking their classmates questions to collect data for math, they love it!

Thank You to our Veterans

On Monday the 2nd graders learned about Veteran's Day, and many students had stories to share of family members who have served in the past or who are currently serving.  One of our classmates has an aunt who is currently stationed in Afghanistan, and we made letters to send her to thank her for her service.  We attended a Veteran's Day ceremony at the end of the day where the elementary sang a beautiful song for all of the veterans.  You can hear a few short clips of the song below.

Awesome Adjectives

We've been learning about characters in our reading and using adjectives to describe them.  After reading "The Duckling Gets a Cookie?!" by Mo Willems, we brainstormed a list of adjectives to describe the crazy Pigeon!  We then called up a classmate and used adjectives to describe her. 

The students wrote out a list of adjectives to describe themselves along with a cute little self-portrait to go along with it.

Personal Narrative Writing

We completed our personal narratives this week in writing.  The students should be very proud of the hard work they put into each step of this writing process.  We began by learning that a personal narrative focuses on a small moment.  We compared it to thinking of a big topic as a whole watermelon and a personal narrative topic as a watermelon seed.  We brainstormed many topic ideas that would be big whole watermelon topics and other topics that would be watermelon seeds.

The next step was to complete a graphic organizer to help us brainstorm all of the details that would go with our small moment.  I asked the students to recall details that related to their 5 senses.  During their small moment, what did they see, hear, smell, taste (if applicable), feel?

The students then took their ideas and wrote them out in complete sentences.  They cut apart their sentences and put them in an order that made the most sense.  We also found that some details needed to be left out if they didn't make sense.  Then the sentences were glued down onto large pieces of construction paper.  The students learned about transition words like first, then, next, finally.  On a colored note card, the students wrote a few transition words to add to their story and cut and glued those in the spots that made sense.  We also added some sound or feeling words to give our writing even more voice.  Those were also written a colored note card and cut and glued on.

After all of these steps were completed, the class was certain that they had their finished writing project.  Then we talked about putting it into a format that can be easily read and understood by their readers.  The final step was to recopy their work onto writing paper, including an illustration, and putting it into a book with a dedication page.  They turned out great, and the students are enjoying reading each other's books on the rug.

On Friday a few students shared their completed writing, and others will share on Monday.

Nice work 2nd graders!

Our 2nd Grade Halloween

We had a great Halloween 2nd grade yesterday!  We began our afternoon with our parent performance of Spunky Punky.  The performance couldn't have gone better!  I'm so proud of the students for all of the hard work they put into practicing their lines.  The show was a hit!

Then the students changed into their Halloween costumes for the costume parade.  They couldn't have been more excited to show off their costumes!

After the costume parade the students enjoyed Halloween snacks, a short Halloween movie, and classroom game time.