Happy Thanksgiving!

I love Thanksgiving because it is all about spending time with the ones you love and making memories. The holiday was a much needed break from school and it was nice to spend time with family and friends. I hope you all had a wonderful holiday! Now to countdown to Christmas break!!! :)

For Thanksgiving in my classroom, we did an adjective lesson and tied in what we are thankful for. We started out with Hairy, Scary, Ordinary:What is an Adjective? by Brian P. Cleary. After an adjective mini-lesson, the kids came up with five things that they were thankful for. For each thing, they had to add three adjectives to describe that noun. Then they wrote them on feathers for these super cute turkey glasses courtesy of my wonderful co-worker and friend, Flo.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Color In Motion 5K

It's about time I did another personal post. Today my 2nd grade teammates and I ran in the Color in Motion 5K to support the Make a Wish Foundation. We woke up early, got messy, were more active than I know I have been in a while, and had an awesome time. :) What a way to spend a Saturday! 

   

So attacking Flo with the green was not a good idea...

Coming up on the final color station... I was totally oblivious of Flo's counter attack plan.

She snuck back to the station and grabbed some ammo while I was instagramming...

I have learned my lesson. NEVER cross Flo and always expect the unexpected. :)

Mission accomplished ladies!

A special thank you to Kristin, for being our awesome new teammate and for getting us to do the 5K.

AND most importantly for posing gangnam style. We are so lucky to be friends with you. :)

We finished off our morning with brunch at Oddfellows in the Bishop Arts District. I've been before for dinner (buffalo mac&cheese) but never for brunch. We were not disappointed. We had mimosas and chicken&waffles. YUMMM!

Happy Saturday!

PS: My friend Florence has a beautiful blog and she also blogged about the event. Her pictures are awesome and you should check it out and follow her! CLICK HERE!

Bucket Fillers!

This fall has been pretty interesting in my classroom. Some of my students have really been having trouble with being respectful and working together. My school has launched the R-time program which I have mentioned in previous posts and it is awesome but it hasn't totally sunk in for all of my kiddos. The program is done once or twice a week for 15 minutes. Students are paired randomly and asked to use manners to have a discussion or work on a short activity together. I have seen improvement overall but there's still more work to do.

Unfortunately, some just can't seem to understand that they need to have good manners and care for each other ALL the time, instead of just when they feel like it. So this week, my high school intern introduced the bucket fillers lesson. My kids are loving it so far so I hope that this adds to our positive classroom community. I really feel like the more we do to help the students build positive relationships and good habits, the better the rest of the year will go. I'll keep you updated on the progress! :)



Election Day

We  had a busy couple of weeks in my second grade classroom on the heels of our red ribbon week. We started out by having a discussion about good leaders and the qualities they should have. Then students got a chance to run or be nominated to run in a 2nd grade primary in my class. Each 2nd grade class elected a president and vice president candidate to run in the 2nd grade election. Then we had a week for the students to campaign and put posters around the school. Finally, we held a 2nd grade election in the library. Each candidate gave a speech and all students got to vote. It was adorable. I don't post photos of my student's faces on here to protect their privacy but here are some highlights from the experience!

Secret Service

Guarding the ballot box 

We chose students to be speakers and secret service. It was so cute and the kids got a chance to have a hands on voting experience. It actually sparked some conversations about our national election the following Tuesday. We read If I Ran for President then I let my kids vote for president so they could practice for when they turn 18. :) I tallied the votes in class and then gave them an electoral vote tracker for the evening's festivities. I hope their interest in the democratic process continues to grow with them so that they rock the vote in 10 years. :)

Happy Halloween!

I hope everyone has survived this week full of halloween festivities! It has been a crazy whirlwind this year with halloween in the middle of the week!

Second grade has been pretty busy this week. We signed up to bring food for the staff as a halloween treat on Wednesday and it was ridiculous! My friend Florence already blogged about it with lots of pictures.
(Check out her post here -- madebyfirenze.blogspot.com)

Then, we decided to do some halloween activities to keep the kiddos engaged. We started out with a writing activity. Since the hamburger analogy is no longer being used to teach the parts of a paragraph, my brilliant colleague suggested that we use the analogy of a spider web.

A good paragraph has sentences that connect from beginning to end like a spider's web. The spider works very carefully to make sure that each thread is placed perfectly. We really wanted to emphasize that even in basic paragraphs they need to revise to make sure that all of the sentences flow together. Then we read a book about spiders and did some research before coming up with these awesome mobiles.

The kids went through the process of prewriting, drafting, revising with a partner, and then editing with me before writing their final drafts on a spider web and then typing their paragraph to publish.



We also did an intro to procedural writing with time order words by carving a pumpkin. It turned out really well even though our anchor chart got a little wrinkled.

Finally, we made fact family haunted houses and they turned out so cute! :)

Happy Halloween y'all! :)