Our First Half Day...Oh What a Busy Second Week

   Thank goodness we had a three day weekend to recoup from the craziness of last week. I felt as if the week lasted for a month. My kiddos are still amazing, but my teammates and I ran into so many roadblocks. Part of our town lost water so we had an early release early last week at 11:15. We had to call each kiddos parent to see how they would get home. Of course it would happen in the middle of our second grade rotations. But, we got all those kiddos home and were excited to have the whole afternoon to plan. (Yes my teammates and I would rather hold our "pee" for a couple hours to get in valuable plan time than go home.)
   As we began navigating through the math units my school adopted this year we were struggling. We love the ideas and rigor of the Georgia Math Units and alignment to the CCSS, but our kiddos need to be experts at skills they simply are not. We pushed up our sleeves and began bouncing ideas off one another...gotta love those two ladies. We began creating activities to fill-in our kiddos gaps so we can jump into the Georgia Units one lesson at a time. I will upload pictures and our lessons as we write, execute, and reflect upon them.
   We jumped into our Data Leadership Notebooks this week with several lessons in graphing. After making an anchor chart we graphed M&Ms and ways we get home from school.

 

    Our writing rotations are also underway. I LOVE switching classroom of kiddos so I can work with all of the second graders and not just my kiddos. This week we practiced our nouns, verbs, and adjectives. In groups we picked a place (farm, zoo, fairy tale, ocean) and then made a town of nouns.

   The kiddos then learned that authors and illustrators label their pictures to make sure the reader knows what they are. This helped build their knowledge of labeling for when we explore non-fiction texts and informational writing in the upcoming weeks. After labeling an anchor chart with sticky notes it was time to label ourselves!

   The kiddos loved this activity! Of course they had to label eyes, nose, and mouth. I think there might have even been a bellybutton labeled. We then went back and labeled our noun towns.

   We ended the week with introducing adjectives with popcorn. Each kiddo got three types of popcorn and we used all of our senses to come up with adjectives to describe the popcorn. We wrote the adjectives on the popcorn kernels on our anchor chart and then began making our own popcorn bag craft.

 Because of the early release we will finish up our popcorn crafts on Tuesday and use one of my favorite stories The Enormous Crocodile to review adjectives with a crocodile craft. Happy Labor Day everyone!