December in a Nutshell

   The last week before Thanksgiving break has come and gone so quickly. Our First Thanksgiving Reader's Theater and 2nd grade feast was a huge success! Here is a little glance at our feast after our play...

   Our kiddos enjoyed lots of mashed potatoes, corn, rolls, pie, and turkey.  And my little kiddo got to disguise his own little turkey for his first grade class last week. Here is his before turkey...

 and his after picture of his favorite living thing on earth...a PENGUIN. 

   Helping my kiddo with his penguin reminded me that December is just a week away and it is time to prep all our holiday Christmas activities. Here is a look ahead at the month of December in our classroom.

   During our Daily 5 Math rotations we will be using my math journals and Polar Express Math Centers each day.  

      During our literacy block we will be comparing and contrasting different versions of the Gingerbread Man. Here is the anchor chart we will be using with each story using sticky notes. 

   We will also go more in-depth with sequence of details, character traits, and comparing and contrasting the settings, characters, and themes. Here are a couple items from my unit. 

   Our writing will include some activities from my Arctic Animals Nonfiction Unit. My kiddos will learn about various arctic animals, which will lead up to our Polar Express unit, and write a research book based on what they learned. This unit contains over a dozen graphic organizers of arctic animals, writing templates, and literacy and math centers. 

   And what is December without a visit from The Elf on the Shelf? This little elf will come packed in a box our first day back from break. My kiddos will infer what is on the inside on the box by using the clues from the outside of the box. Inside will be The Elf on the Shelf book, elf, student journals, and a letter from Santa. My plan is to have our classroom elf hide each day around our room the first week and then become mischievous the last two weeks before Christmas break. My classroom kiddos will draw and write what the elf is doing each morning in their journals. You can get my Elf on the Shelf unit, with package labels, Santa letter, student journals, persuasive writing templates, and math centers, and all of my other December themed units by clicking on the above images. 

Happy Thanksgiving!

9 Days Counting & This Upcoming Week

   With conferences this upcoming week I prepared this weekend the perfect way......shopping with the boys! I did also work on some math and literacy centers for November. My classroom kiddos have been having such a blast practicing their stamina with our math work bins. They have become experts the last couple of days and can complete these bins independently. Can I get an AMEN! We are 9 days out from implementing Daily 5 Math full-force in second grade. Here is a look at my little mathematicians hard at work play this past week with my Apples Math Centers available in my TPT store.

 Graphing with Halloween erasers

 Matching addition and subtraction equation apples to there apple answers

 Matching analog time to digital time to the hour and half-hour

 Matching expanded notation apples to there numeral

 Sorting numerals by odd or even

Grabbing a small handful of apples and graphing.

   I am so proud of these kiddos! They are LOVIN math, which is making me love math. We have 90 minutes of math each day and I have been hearing this last week moans and groans when I say that it is time to clean-up. They want to keep learning. Our plan this week is to continue building our math writing stamina, with my math journals and word problem stories, and math work skills. Our goal by next Monday is to be moving on to Math with Someone and Math Technology.

   Our writing block is working really well this year too. As I have mentioned before my teammates and I have included science and social studies into this block as well. Last week our kiddos worked really hard to incorporate what they learned about the pumpkin life cycle into an expository writing piece. This week we will learn how the seasons and weather impact living things. After an autumn read aloud we will introduce our kiddos to facts vs. opinions and hit our opinion writing standard. Our goal is to write "Why Autumn is the Best Season". Here is a look at the anchor chart we will use to introduce fact and opinion...

and a sneak peak at our craft for Friday...

   This is a tree template that our kiddos will color and cut-out the middle. Kiddos will then rip autumn colored paper to create "leaves" and place in a baggie. We will tape the baggie to the back of the tree template and glue a blue piece of paper to the back. When dry the leaves will "fall" from the trees when tipped back and forth like a snow globe.

   With only four days of school this week I am unsure if we will have any kiddos make it to the writing center, but if they do they will get a spooky surprise with these little Halloween critters. These are also the same creepy crawlers that I will throw into our math work graphing bin when I place my Halloween Math Centers into our bins next week.

Have a great Monday!!!





A Nonfiction Writing Unit

   Fall is definitely in the air! The mornings have a little chill, there are pumpkins everywhere I look, and to top it off we might get a little dusting of snow this Friday! My kiddos have been so excited for the fall activities that we have been working on this week.

   Everyday my kiddos practice their Daily 5 Math stamina. We even have a little daily countdown reminder on our board that lets us know how many days left we have to build our stamina to begin the rotations independently. 14 days left! I don't know who is more excited my kiddos or me?!?! I am excited to begin pulling math groups EVERY day during this 30 minute block. Today we introduced our math bins with graphing. I found some cute little Halloween erasers in the $1 section at Target and we used the graphing page from my Halloween Math Centers unit. After graphing how many erasers we had it was time to use our data to answer some questions.

   This week in our writing block we are using my Pumpkin Nonfiction Writing Unit. Our kiddos are learning about the pumpkin life cycle. They are using the vocabulary in addition to the steps of the life cycle into an expository writing piece including the transition words we have been learning. Here are some pictures from our unit...

 We began by finding pictures in magazines that display living and nonliving things.



Our vocabulary picture cards on our Science Focus Wall.

 Using our anchor chart to fill-in our graphic organizer.

We labeled each picture and wrote a topic and closing sentence.

   We are finishing up our final drafts tomorrow. My kiddos will then get to make a pumpkin life cycle craft on Friday. Here is a peek at what it will look like.

 When students pull out the "stem" the pumpkin life cycle will come out of the pumpkin on a string.

You can get these activities and many more in my Pumpkin Nonfiction Writing Unit by clicking on the image below.

 



Super Sentence Hero's and Working on Writing Stamina

   I cannot believe that we have already completed three weeks of school! Where has the time gone? I feel like my kiddos are finally getting into the swing of the classroom routines and expectations. With beginning of the year testing almost complete my teammates and I are ready to begin our official Walk to Read rotations on Monday.
   Our Leadership Data Notebooks are going so well and my kiddos are finally able to complete three activities each morning during our warm-up without my prompting. YEAH!  More to come on how I use my data notebooks daily.
   This week my writing kiddos became SUPER SENTENCE HERO'S! Using my punctuation unit, and the cutest little superhero masks I found at Michaels, we began by reviewing what types of sentences receive a period, question, or exclamation marks. We sorted super sentences onto an anchor chart...

   When we had a good idea of punctuation marks at the end of sentences we made our own asking and telling sentences to place on our classroom cape.

   Once all of our sticky notes were placed on the cape we read the sentences aloud and my kiddos superhero's held up the correct punctuation mark to match the sentence.

(I love how they are looking to see if they have the right punctuation mark.)

   We made a punctuation flipbook, a cut& paste practice page, and finished up our unit by making our own little superhero punctuation marks.



 In addition to our superhero unit my kiddos finally got the opportunity to begin to explore the writing center. My kiddos from my Walk to Read room also were introduced to the writing center to build their Work on Writing stamina.

    Here we are working with letter stamps, etch-a-sketches, and finger puppets.





 My Walk to Read kiddos are up to 12 minutes of writing stamina! I was so proud of all of them being real writers...no pretend words, scribbling, or sitting doing nothing. My writing kiddos also did well with the materials when they finished their work. This week they will have "fancy" paper and stickers.

   You can get my Super Sentence Hero's Unit in my TPT store by clicking on the link below.

 

 

 

 

 

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!