Our highlight of the week was Pajama Day!  We wore our pjs to school, and in the afternoon we snuggled up on the carpet and watched The Tale of Despereaux.  The teachers treated the class to popcorn and juice.  I wish every day were PJ Day!

Here are the skills we worked on this week:

• synonyms (These are tricky!  Kids often confuse synonyms with opposites, homophones, compound words, you name it.  They are learning so many types of words right now, it's easy to get confused.)
• ABC order
• missing addends
• using pictures to solve word problems
• question/statement sorting and punctuating

We also started a new morning work routine.  Every day when the students arrive, they will respond to a writing prompt in their journals.  They have to write at least 3 sentences.  After they finish writing, they proofread for capitalization, punctuation, spelling, and complete sentences.  Then they get to illustrate their paragraphs.

I also introduced the "Pick It!" cart this week.  This cart is designed to give the students something meaningful to work on if they finish an activity early.  Students may choose from the following drawers:  Make It, Draw It, Journal It, Solve It, Write It, and Read It.  They complete these activities in their journals, too.  Each activity covers grade-level appropriate skills, and they also appeal to the multiple intelligences of learning.  (You can learn more about multiple intelligences here.)  

We are having so much fun!  :)

We have such a sweet class of second graders!  It's nice to have a pretty even ratio of boys to girls, and they've all been working so nicely together.  I am crossing my fingers that they will keep it up for the rest of the year!

It didn't take us too long to learn our rules and routines, so we had lots of time to work on fun activities.  On Tuesday, we each made a book about ourselves so that we could get to know one another.

The activities and skills that we worked on this week were:

• putting color words in ABC order
• matching homophones
• sorting words by number of syllables
• thinking of and identifying rhyming words
• rearranging letters in a phrase to make other words
• telling time in 5-minute increments
• solving addition equations for missing addends

We have quite the group of smarties!  They are such hard workers, and it's nice to see them asking and helping their group members.  Cooperation and helping others are important values in my classroom!

This year in second grade, you will be learning how to write in cursive.  This can be a little tricky-- honestly, can you say as an adult that you remember the proper way to form all of your cursive letters?  I found a wonderful website that not only shows you the cursive letters, but also animates them so you can see the exact order and direction of the lines.