Happy Monday! We have kicked off the first full week of school with a bang. Here is a highlight of our day- Our vocabulary word of the day was arithmetic. In printing we practiced the letter, i. We talked about what collective nouns are. We reviewed the short vowel sounds for spelling. Mrs. Sexton came to our class for library. We practiced skip counting by 10's and 5's. We had music with Mrs. Rose.

Welcome to Mrs. Saunders' 2nd grade class 2016-2017! I am so excited to start the new year and meet all of you. Our first day of school is tomorrow, September 6th. It is a half day of school

Great day today at the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum

Thank you to all of my wonderful parents that came with us on our field trip to the Ann Arbor Hands on Museum.  It was an amazing trip!!

What did you do on your snow day?

Zach and Grace

We had two wonderful snow days!  The snow was perfect for building snowmen and playing outside.  I asked everyone to send me photos, so that our class could write about our snow days when we return on Monday. Here are a couple of the cute pics you sent me.

Ryan and Reaghan

Gavin out in the snow

I am going to be honest, 100s' Day took me off guard.  I am not sure if it is because we just came back from break or what, but I wasn't prepared at all.  Since I had little amount of planning time, I decided to change things up a bit. Thus, MINECRAFT 100 Day was born!!

Our first task was to break into teams and decided on a team name.  Then the kids designed pixelated logos.
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The teams then had different challenges such as, come up with 100 rhyming words and decided if 100 different numbers were odd or even.

In the afternoon, the students needed to find 100 words around the room.  They they were given 100 strips of paper and had to make a chain.  How creative!

What did you do today?

I love it when I ask the kids this at the end of the day, and all they say is, "Recess...lunch..."  The good news is that they did more than lunch and recess today.

Our class had its Coding Club time today.  Over the past two weeks I have introduced the children to many different types of coding programs.  I really wanted to allow them time to build their schema of the subject in a fun and none threatening way.  Today, we actually started to work with Scratch to create a project.  The students learned many new vocabulary words, how to develop a background, change the sprite, and add motion/sound to a project.  The children then presented their work to their classmates.

Scratch  

As an extension of coding, we talked a little about binary codes and then wrote Valentines messages to our friends in secret code.  The students wrote these codes  on paper airplanes.  We used technology to learn how to make different kinds of paper airplanes and experimented with different weights of paper.  The children then launched their airplanes and we measured how far they flew.  To wrap up the project the children threw their airplanes across the room to a friend, who then went and solved the mystery message.

In science today, we did a science experiment on solids, liquids, and gases.  The children were able to compare and contrast the three states with balloons.  They then made a cute flip book of the three states of matter with a vocabulary section.

Coding Club is up and running!!

We just finished up week two of Coding Club, and I am amazed at how quickly everyone is gobbling up the cool programs we are using.  To kick off our club, the students were introduced to the following programs:

Chrome Books

Koadable

Hour of Code

The Foos

Scratch

iPads

Lightbot

Cargobot

Scratch Jr.

The Foos

This week we also introduced Dash and Dot!!  

The kids are having so much fun with these two!!  They are two little robots that make coding fun.  

This week coming up we are going to dive deeper into Scratch.