We had a lot of fun this week, especially with our Fall Party on Thursday!

The skills we covered on Tuesday were:

• place value (to the thousands place)
• proofreading (for capitalization, punctuation, spelling)
• pronouns

Because Thursday was a party day, we did some special activities:

• We wrote cinquain poems about spiders.
• We estimated the weight, height, and circumference of pumpkins, then found their actual measurements.
• We then painted the pumpkins.
• We made a tally chart of pumpkin shapes.
• We identified odd and even numbered leaves.

Here is a picture of our class combined with the first grade class.  (I am dressed as Harry Potter, and Mrs. Williams is the Paper Bag Princess.)  Enjoy!

This week, I have implemented our Two Minute Warning.  This is a short, 2-minute drill to practice our math facts.  Some of the students were a little nervous to be timed, so we started out with some very easy problems.  The students earn a sticker for every day that they complete all of all of their facts correctly.  Once they fill up their sticker charts, they will get to visit the treasure box! 

Here are the skills we practiced this week:

• probability (more/less/equally likely)
• consonant blends
• coordinate grids
• continents
• proper nouns

Reminders:

Scholastic Book Orders are due by Nov. 1st!  These make great gifts for the holidays or any other time.  (It's easy to order and pay online with a credit card.)

If your child is attending our Book Character Day/Fall Party, please RSVP!  We also have treat sign-up sheets outside the room.

Book-It! is in full swing!  Our goal is to read 20 minutes/day, 5 days/week.  We have punch cards here in the classroom-- students get one punch for every day they have filled in on their Book-It! calendars.  If they fill up the card (20 punches) by the end of the month, they will earn a coupon for a free mini Pizza Hut pizza!  (Please keep these calendars in your child's take-home folder so that they can earn their punches.)

The kids were SO EXCITED to start ArtReach classes this week!  They are taking quite the mixture of classes, including History of Pirates, hula dancing, and more!  The Mad Science workshop will begin the last week of October.  I wish I could take some of these classes!

We only had classes on Tuesday this week because of our field trip to the Carnegie Science Center.  The topics we worked on were:

• math fact families
• subtraction with missing subtrahends
• pumpkin life cycles
• a-z alphabetical order classroom scavenger hunt

Here are some pictures from our Science Center trip.  Enjoy!

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!