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.

Happy New Year!

I am so happy to be back to school and diving into learning again.

Here is what we are doing this week in second grade:

Reading- We kicked off the week with our mentor text- Alexander Who Used To Be Rich Last Sunday.  Our focus is learning about the authors message, and how the characters give us understanding to what the author is trying to teach us.

Grammar-  The students are learning about pronouns this week.  We have been doing many different activities whole group and individual to learn more about these parts of speech.

Writing-  This week in writing we are taking a look at the different components of non-fiction.  If you have some non-fiction books at home, spend some time noticing all of the different features.

Math- Cha-Ching!! To go along with our mentor text, we have been working with money this week.  The students have been making different combinations of coins, solving challenges and adding and subtracting amounts under $1.00.

Social Studies- Our new social studies unit is all about the past. We will be learning about what our community was like long ago.

Thursday, December 10th

Hello everyone!!  We are wrapping up our study of fairy tales and moving onto fables.  Today, we read our last fairy tale, The Princess and the Pea.  The students then broke off into groups to write their own fairy tale.  We were only able to finish our sloppy copies of these modern day fairy tales.  Hopefully, tomorrow we will be able to post them on the blog.

Our first fable was The Ant and the Grasshopper.  Diligently was our vocabulary word of the day.  +

For our fairy tale challenge of the day, the students had to design parachutes that would safely take the princess to the ground from a tall ladder.