"Night Flyers"

We have been reading informational text to learn more about "Bats", those special creatures of the night! Reesa's mom, from ASU, visited our class to help us have a better understanding about why bats are important to us and how scientists gather information about these fascinating mammals. We certainly enjoyed the paired learning activity about "echolocation"!

              

All About Bats on PhotoPeach

Celebrating Veteran's Day

Our Second Grade Classes at Meadowlark spent time learning more about the history of Veteran's Day and why we observe this special day each year. As a culminating activity, a Vietnam War Veteran from a Winston-Salem VFW Post visited us on Thursday. Mr. Frank shared information about this National Holiday and about his service time. Our classes also made cards for veterans to thank them for protecting and preserving our freedom.
Salute to Our American Veterans on PhotoPeach

Building "Place Value" Schema

Last week our math lessons involved showing numbers in different ways. We used our unifix cubes, place value blocks, some online interactive base ten blocks, and a little story about Ten's Town on our Smartboard.  By Thursday, we just needed a little extra "pizzaz" during math time, so a trip to the grocery store provided just what we needed to "cement the concepts" in our schema files. It's amazing what food does for a lesson plan. This time, pretzels and Cheerios were that little "extra" that helped us better understand how to "regroup" numbers and express numbers in different ways as well as adding those two digit numbers together.
Learning About Place Value on PhotoPeach

Book Reports

Our first attempt at completing a Book Report involved a little creativity. Thank you parents for your support at home with this project! As you can see from the pictures below, the projects turned out beautifully. We certainly enjoyed sharing our reports in class!
Story Skeleton Book Reports on PhotoPeach

Pumpkin Day 2011

Thanks to our wonderful parent helpers, we celebrated the season with our annual "Pumpkin Day" activities. We reviewed our math and literacy skills by participating in this global technology project. You can read more about this project here: http://www.jenuinetech.com/Projects/2011PS/2011ps_information.html

Our second graders worked in teams to determine the size of various pumpkins and whether a pumpkin would sink or float. We also used our counting strategies to find the total number of seeds our 5 pound pumpkin had. We didn't realize how many seeds could be in a pumpkin! Check out the website to see the number of seeds we found.

Of course this project had a tasting event! We enjoyed eating and writing about the yummy pumpkin treats! Thank you moms for helping us!!!

Customize your own digital scrapbooking design

Project O.R.E.O.

Our second graders joined other students around the globe to determine how many Oreo cookies we could stack in a tower before the tower tumbled. Working with a partner, we first made our estimate. Then, the stacking began! We each had two attempts and recorded the greatest number of our stacked cookies. After everyone stacked, counted, and recorded, we combined our results to get our class total. That took a little bit of work. We had to use some interesting addition strategies to determine our total number. Of course the calculator came in handy. Then the teachers helped out by finding the "average" number of cookies our class stacked by dividing (or as we say, "diving up") the total by the number of students who stacked. It was fun to compare our results with other students around the globe! Enjoy our pictures and check out this global technology project here: http://www.jenuinetech.com/Projects/2011oreo/2011oresults.html
 Project O.R.E.O. on PhotoPeach

Catching Up!

It's hard to believe how quickly the days fly by! I seem to have less time each day to get things accomplished. Each night I chat with my mom and tell her that I need to add some more hours in my day. She's at the phase in her life that hours seem to drag along, so she just can't imagine why I want to add more hours. In our second grade classroom, we try to engage in interesting projects daily, however, we've been in "assessing mode" with our end of quarter and standardized assessment requirements. At any rate, I'm finally getting around to posting some pictures of my terrific second graders! Just taking a peek at their sweet little faces working together in learning tasks lets you see how a classroom is "the" place to be.
Days in Second Grade on PhotoPeach