Best Birthday Ever!

Thanks for making me feel so special today! I had the best birthday ever! I came in this morning to find even more decorations on my whiteboard.  Mrs. Carsner and both 2nd grade classes spent some time this morning decorating the room with black balloons and black streamers. I received flowers from 3 different students, lip balm for another student, and several sweet cards. I bought a cake to share with both 2nd grade classes, and Ben brought cupcakes, too! Sorry, folks, but we had a lot of sugar today. We also watched the parade practice, where I received the surprise of the entire student body singing happy birthday to me.  Ahh....now for a good night's sleep before tomorrow's field trip.

Fun Day!

I started out a little grumpy today, but seeing the faces of my "Tweetie Pies" made me feel better. For our Bible lesson, I gave each student some clay and told them to build a statue dedicated to God. They came up with some nice ideas, such as stars, crosses, hearts, etc. Next, I told them the story of King Hezekiah and how he told the people to destroy the idols they had created. The students had to destroy their statues. It was fun to watch them smash, squish, and pound them!

We have been learning about the parts of a friendly letter so students have been learning to write their own address. Today, they wrote letters to Santa, which I promised to deliver.

Tomorrow is my 50th birthday and the students are just as excited as I am about it. They wrote a nice message to brighten my day.

Mayflower Building

Mayflower Building
Click the link above to see a slideshow of some photos from our Mayflower building STEM project. Thanks for everyone for the hands-on help and for the materials you sent in. We had a blast!!

More Landforms

Kamryn's mountain

Skylar's island

Ben's edible Grand Canyon

Angelina's volcano

Olivia's island

Landform Presentations

Landform projects were due yesterday and today some students were able to share theirs with the class. (The rest will share tomorrow.) It appears that they enjoyed this project, so you can expect more hands-on projects like this one in the future. Here are some pics of those who presented today.

Landforms

This week in geography, we are learning about landforms. I am adding some web sites that your child can use to learn more about landforms. Today they played a concentration game with landform cards. Both cards had the picture of a particular landform, but one had the name of the landform and the other had the definition. As they played, they learned new information. After playing the game with a partner, they colored the cards.

We are also learning about Author's Purpose. There are 3 main reasons why author's write and we can remember them with the acronym PIE: persuade, inform, and entertain. Today students cut and glued a foldable into their interactive notebooks about author's purpose. Tomorrow, they will search the classroom for examples of different purposes.We also learned some rules for making the plural forms of nouns, which we also put in our interactive notebooks.

Water Cycle

Today we learned about the "Bossy R," that tells vowels to make an angry sound. Bossy R is polite, though, because he lets the vowel go first. When one group was at guided reading with me, they were generating r-controlled words and decided to add "fart" to the list. Oh, my! We created interactive notebooks during writing today. The notebooks will become a place to collect all the spelling rules we learn this year. We are doing something similar for science and social studies, as well. In our science notebooks, we wrote a definition for evaporation. Tomorrow we'll add condensation. We made mini water cycles-in-action. We drew the sun, a cloud, and waves onto the outside of a sandwich baggie, added a little water and blue food coloring, and taped the bags to the window. We will watch what happens as the sun hits the window in the mornings. As the water evaporates and condensation accumulates, we can tap on the bag to watch the droplets combine to make bigger drops that will get heavy enough to "rain." Cool, huh? The students are super excited!