Our new room!

This is an old picture from step up day.  They have grown so much!

We have had a great short, but first week back.  We are pleased with the new classroom arrangement, which allows for small group reading as well as more movement and flexible seating during the day. 

Here's our start to the new year:

We continue to build our understanding of language mechanics through the mentor sentence program.  This past week, students worked on sorting winter words that were either nouns or adjectives.  Because students are growing this parts of speech foundation, I can give them very specific feedback on the mechanics of their own writing.  And then, by partnering this work with our "Would You Rather" project, a series of short writing tasks, I hope that students will gain a deeper understanding of what makes great writing.  We tried out our first question this week:  Would you rather only have heat or only have air conditioning?  In this weather, you can imagine that many students chose heat!

We have only had one session of math this week because of Minute to Win-It, the snow day and the delay.  We are just getting our feet wet with measurement.  Here is the basic concept for next week:  if you measure one distance with 2 different standard units, the larger unit will produce a smaller number and the smaller number will produce a larger number.  Further, why would you choose one standard unit over another unit?  This week we used feet to measure in the classroom, next week we'll be taking our "show" on the road to measure the distance from the classroom to the office in yards.

I hope to begin our unit on mapping next week for Social Studies.  Second graders need to become familiar with the compass rose, a map key as well as the continents and oceans on a world map.  We are lucky because our class is doing land forms in science with Mrs. Fake which matches perfectly with social studies.  Wait till you see their BEAUTIFUL landform posters!