Henry and Mudge, Doubles, and Verbs

We LOVE Henry and Mudge books!! We have been using them to study various reading strategies and for our first opinion writing. To help with this first opinion writing we wrote all about Mudge and did this cute craftivity (from Amy Lemons).

We are also learning about verbs and how they are action words. We used superheroes to make this learning stick.

 

 

In math, we are learning various addition and subtraction strategies. We are all about "Doubles" and "Doubles +1" right now. To help learn our doubles, we made these gum ball machines (from Saddle Up in Second Grade).

 

 

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Launching Read to Someone

We did our first day of Read to Someone and it was a success!!! The children were able to maintain stamina for 6 minutes the first try and ten minutes the second try. I love Read to Someone because it is an excellent opportunity for the children to practice their fluency and work collaboratively to check for understanding.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Math Groups!

We have officially started Math Groups and the kids made me one very happy teacher with how well they did today working independently. We are calling it our Daily 3 to kind of go with how we are doing the Daily 5 in language arts. One group is doing math centers, one group is doing math games, and the other is doing math apps on the iPads/Pods. The best part about math groups is the kids are working in pairs and are collaborating. I love hearing them discuss how to solve problems together and how they help each other. Math groups also allow me to pull small groups and reinforce learning as needed.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Powerful Sentences, Setting Goals, and Marvelous Mathematicians

We have had a great start to the school year. We have been focusing on building our classroom community, getting into routines, and have spent a lot of time launching the Daily 5. We are already up to almost twelve minutes during Read to Self. Yesterday, we launched Work on Writing and made it over four minutes our first try. In fact, we could have gone longer but it was lunchtime!

In writing, we are working on building powerful sentences. We used the noun "second graders" and built powerful sentences around it substituting "second graders" for many different synonyms. Today, after we built the sentence we wrote it in our journals.

 

We also set goals of what we wanted to accomplish this year and did a cute craftivity to go with our goals. The recycling lesson they had from last year really stuck because that was definitely a popular goal this year!!!

 

 

Today we used a lesson from Amy Lemons and brainstormed what mathematicians do such as try their best, use multiple strategies, visualize the math problem, and relate math to real life situations.

 

 

 

 

 

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Ready for another year!

After weeks of working in my room, studying the new common core, writing lessons plans, prepping materials and stalking many other wonderful teachers' blogs, I FINALLY feel ready to begin the new school year. I can't wait to meet my new class!!! Here is a peek at our classroom:

This is a shot of a table of student desks with our classroom library along the side of it.

Our rug area is where we do most of our learning along with lots singing and dancing! You can see that we are all ready to launch The Daily Five on the first day of school. Our book boxes and I chart for Read to Self are ready to go.

Here is our guided reading table. The bulletin board behind the table is ready for a craftivity we will use to set our year long goals.

View towards the back of the room.

Our math focus wall.

Our math centers and below the common core math centers that we will be focused on during the first few weeks of school.

It is going to be a great year!

 

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