Helping & Enjoying Others

Today we had the opportunity to help one of our favorite kindergarten teachers (Mrs. Stewart). She had her students paint pictures and we scanned them for her so she can make an order form. Kindergarten will be selling Christmas cards and we will be selling everyday cards. Cards should be back from the print shop and ready to purchase by mid week (Dec. 3rd). We will sale 8 cards for $5.00. If you know you want second grade cards, you can send your money in and we will send you home the cards as soon as they get back. We are looking forward to raising money to help others in the area. (If you are interested in Christmas cards, just send a note or email me and I will get you an order form).

Here are KC and LS using the scanner.

We checked in with our second grade pen pals today through their blog. We couldn't wait to push the play button to watch their Disco Elf video. Here we are enjoying it.

Read A Thon Reward

We started off our day with a Read A Thon award . Mrs. Miltenberger invited us to the gym to watch a movie with all our friends. We got to snuggle up with our pillows and blankets. It was a lot of fun.

In the afternoon we went to our second grade buddies room to see their Thanksgiving readers theater. They did a great job reading and acting and we really enjoyed it.
Then we added some color to the turkeys we started last week.
Here are some of our pictures.

Today was JD's birthday. Here he is getting ready to answer questions from us so we can make his birthday book. Happy Birthday !!!

Disco Five

Send your own ElfYourself eCards

Writing Fun

We did all kinds of writing today. Here is FA showing you the page she wrote for DC's birthday book.

Here is TK who wrote this during free time.

I love it when students write just because they want to express themselves.

Here is a group of readers who are reading to our wonderful volunteer, Lanny Straughan.

She comes in each week to help us with anything we need. She also stayed and ate with us. How neat is that? What a wonderful gift of time she gives us. Here is KS signing her reading work. She is in a group that is reading about making pizza. Her activity was to choose four items to put on her pizza and then write about her choices. We are working on sequencing in our writing.

Now it is DC's turn.
We are back to daily practice with our math facts.
Each day we see how many addition problems we can compete correctly in 60 seconds.
Here FA is filling in her chart to show that she has passed another level. Way to go FA.
JD also passed his next level. Our goal is to be able to do 30 problems in one minute.

This afternoon we did a couple of projects. The first one was to learn how to write a complete sentence. Here is AP working.
We started out by (I) identifying the item we want to write about.

Then we (V) pick a verb or action word to go with it.

Then we (F) finish out thought.

See the video at the end of this post to hear some samples of our work.

The next project we did involved our reading buddies.

Since today was our last day together before Thanksgiving, we created a turkey cookie out of some fun foods. Here are some pictures to enjoy.

Writing To Our Pen Pals

We finished up our letters to our pen pals today and can't wait to send them off. This is the most fun we have ever had writing letters!

This morning we had a drill to practice "sheltering in place". This is when everyone at school meets in the gym and we seal off all the outside doors. If we ever had an emergency, we would have a safe place to go. We were quick and safe in today's practice.

October S.T.A.R Awards

Today Mrs. Miltenberger came in and gave us our S.T.A.R certificates for completing our October reading. Way to go second graders. Hope everyone is reading for their November awards.

Saying Good-Bye

Today we said "good-bye" to our scarecrows.

We started to take them apart and posed for a few last photos.
It took the whole group to carry this big guy in.

For a few minutes it was like a snowstorm of newspapers.

and organized chaos.

We also finished our pumpkin patch and scarecrow photo album pages today.

It was a great day spent with friends.

Enjoy your weekend.

Store Opening

Today we got to spend our hard earned money.

Here are FA, GU, and EN running the store. See below to see and hear a small clip of the action.

Some of the students purchases mustaches!

Here they are looking at themselves in the mirror! Too funny.
We all had a great laugh with them. Some were able to wear them all day long.We finally got back to our fund raising project, our cards.
Today we finished them up and now I will take them to the print shop and get them printed.
They will be ready for sale soon, so we can help you with your holiday shopping.

We will use our profit to help a family in need this winter along with getting something for our room that we all want. We will be discussing this after we see how well our project goes.
We painted our paper, then made flowers with the paper.
Today we tore different shapes and sizes to help tie it all together.

I think they will be bright and cheery cards that anyone would love to receive.

Here BR and BB are working together on their card.

On Halloween we got mail from our pen pals. It was so much fun and today we started writing our letters back. Here ST is re reading her letter before she responds back.

We are really having fun writing to our second grade friends and it seems so easy to write when it is meaningful.

Items that we are focused on in our letter writing are: a greeting, information about us, questions for our reader, a salutation, capital letters, and punctuation.

Here is a video clip of our store that we opened this morning.

Scrapbooking Like Crazy

No spelling this week!

We try to scrapbook each special event, so today we made a couple pages from our Halloween party. Here are SO and KF working together.

MH laying it out just right.

Look at all the cutting scraps! After we were all done, thanks to GU, we didn't have a single piece left out.

This is a very fun time of the day. I enjoy watching everyone create and interact.

We take our pictures, some fun clipart, and our writing to create these wonderful memory pages.

Then we place them in our 3 ring binders.

We are working on counting coins and found this neat website where we could use our activotes to keep track of our answers. You can practice too at: http://www.haelmedia.com/html/mc_mk_003.html

We only have a few more days at this website, but the kids really wanted me to post the site, so here it is: http://auth.grolier.com/login/bookflix/login.php

We have a free trial until November 15th. Students can go here to listen and read along to great literature. user name is: bkflix password is: read