Five for Friday: Welcome November!

Linking up with Doodlebugs for another Five for Friday!

Mustache you a question survey, data collection & bar graphs are always a hit & the photos are just a hoot!

They make for a pretty great hallway decoration too!

My kiddos are LOVING that our new classroom website has a blog section! I'm choosing kiddos to write solo & collaborative posts about what we do in school during the week. Loving the free weebly education site features! May even have these second graders creating their own websites soon - also through the weebly education site!

We are studying matter in Science and the kiddos LOVED this liquid investigation. I had mystery liquids in cups around the room (hand soap, dish soap, water, milk, glue, etc.) First the kiddos observed with their eyes & drew the liquid, then they smelled the liquid, recording what they smelled. They were then able to use their touch to observe the liquids. Finally, they guessed what they thought the liquid was. They rotated between all the liquids, recording their observations. At the end of the investigation I revealed the identify of the liquids. So fun! Grab yourself a copy of our recording sheet below:

My district has school on Veterans Day so I always try to do something to honor the brave men & women who have and are protecting our freedoms. This year we made star wreathes. Each star had a word we thought of when we heard "Veterans Day" after reading a Scholastic News about Veterans Day & going to our "Poppies & Poetry" Veterans Day assembly. We made this wordle with our words so students had somewhere to refer when creating their wreathes.

Loving the November door one of my families created! Be sure to check out tomorrow's post on Mrs. McClain's Blog Hop to learn all you Oughta Know about door decorations!

Five for Friday: Fall Fall Fall

Linking up with Doodlebugs for another Five for Friday

We are all about bats the past week and a half! Check out Tuesday's book talk here to see what we've been up to!

We went on a field trip around our town and to a farm last week. The kiddos had a fabulous time, especially in the one room school house! The questions were priceless... "how could all those grades fit in here?!" "how did the teacher know what to teach?" "why did the students have to use chalk?" Yes we have reached a generation where very few kiddos have been exposed to chalkboards in a classroom!!!

I've expanded my "teach your hand" to "teach your foot" while students are waiting for the rest of the class to finish writing something down during a whole group lesson. To learn more about teaching your hand and foot, check out this weeks Whole Brain Wednesday.

I've been dying for an excuse to use the magic curtain strategy I learned about in my grad class to build excitement and get students talking about a new unit. We are starting a unit on matter, so I decided to cover up solids, liquids & gases on the carpet to build excitement while my kiddos ate lunch (they eat in my room) wondering why I wouldn't tell them what was hiding under the table cloth!

You might have thought there was candy or critters underneath with how excited they were when I finally revealed what was underneath. After observing and discussing with their partner, they had to make a prediction about what we'd be learning about in science.

We made these awesome pumpkins last year and it took FOREVER... so this year I smartened up and had our 6th grade reading buddies help us out with the cutting. These are really cute and simple... 11 same size orange circles, fold 10 in half and make a slit about half way from the fold side. Slide the folds onto the 1 not-cut circle and spread them out to create the pumpkin look. Then glue on a green stem... easy peasy!


Have a lovely weekend!

Ready but not ready for Summer

So today marks 19 days to go... in some ways that feels like a lot of days to get through... like when I have to repeat my directions 85 hundred times but feels like not enough time AT ALL when I realize that 19 minus 4 days at the WBT conference minus Challenge Day (field day) minus end of the year field trip minus the couple afternoons that will be spent at meetings minus the last day of school (bc it just doesn't count).... equals.... 11(ish) days of instruction left with my kiddos! Ahhh... I still have an entire math lesson to teach, yikes!

Anywho... I'm linking up with Doodlebugs Teaching for Five for Friday...

[one]

The exercise balls are here and inflated! Mrs. R was NOT kidding when she said she had to do LOTS of modeling with them for her kiddos. I already have 2 kiddos who lost theirs for the week because they decided to "dribble" theirs around during packup... oy vey! But on the plus side, it is easy to see how much it is helping the kiddos I chose to test them out!

[two]

We released our butterflies this week. The kiddos were so excited! It was amazing how quickly these creatures went from little teeny tiny caterpillars to beautiful butterflies!

[three]

Terrible picture, but we tie dyed shirts this week to wear on Challenge Day which is our school's version of field day. Every class does some kind of shirt so they all match. The whole second grade team decided on tie dye. I let my kiddos tie them up but myself, my sister and a mom volunteer handled the dye. I was a little nervous what 7 and 8 year old hands might do with dye that just so happens to be very permanent!

[four]

We decorated our door for the end of the year. It didn't look like much like an ocean until we got the fish and turtles up.

[five]

On Thursday with 20 days left of the school year, my kiddos each wrote about what they hope to do in the remaining 20 days. It goes along with an ice cream cone count down I have outside my door. I got both of these in Just Wild About Teaching's freebie here.

Have a great weekend!

5 5 5 Weeks to Go!

This week has been very long and I just realized this morning that there are 5 weeks left of school and I'm out 4 of the 5 days the last week for the Whole Brain Teaching National Conference. So naturally I seriously am starting to stress out!!! (haha)

But anyway, I'm linking up with 5 for Friday on Doodlebug's Teaching.

[ONE]

If you didn't already check out part 2 of our visit to Mrs. R's room to see her fantastic Daily 5 routines, go check it out here. Mrs. R is seriously awesome!

[TWO]

My first ever rafflecopter giveaway came to an end on Monday. Go check out the blogs of the winners on the winners revealed post here.

[THREE]

I didn't get to share this awesome cup one of my students gave me for Teacher Appreciation last week, so here it is! It has my name on the other side, so darn cute. And had $100 (yes that says $100) giftcard to Education Works... I almost FELL OVER!

I plan on using some of the giftcard to buy some of these awesome stamper sets for Word Work next year!

[FOUR]

We've been working on fractions and I found a few fun (and free) fraction games for the kiddos to do. One game was a fraction memory/match-up game. You can find it here. The other was St. Patrick's Day themed, but the kiddos barely noticed. You can find it here.

We also made fraction books from Amy Lemons. Find it here.


[FIVE]

My kiddos have been going wild the past 2 days because we've had some butterflies emerge from their chrysalises.  It's so hard to take a picture with the screen in the way.


Have a wonderful weekend!

What a Great Week!

This week has truly been fabulous. Launching Daily 5, studying caterpillars, and the beginning of Fairy Tale & Shapes units, wooh!

So in honor of a wonderful week, I'm not only linking up with Doodlebugs Five for Friday but I also created a FREEBIE to go along with Daily 5, hooray! as well as a shapes freebie and am linking up with Teaching Blog Addict for Freebie Friday!

First things first... If you're looking for the freebies, scroll down to #2 for a Daily 5 freebie and to #4 for a shapes freebie!

If you read Tuesday's post, you know Daily 5 is my new obsession! I am so proud of my kiddos and how well they have adapted to the change to our normal centers schedule. I truly can't wait to start Daily 5 on day 1 next year!

If you missed the post on my ravings of Daily 5 and CAFE, check it out here. And be sure to stay tuned as we visit my former across-the-hall-neighbor next week. I can't WAIT to post a blog about her adorable room and fabulous teaching!

I hope you enjoy the pictures (from the post linked above) of my kiddos trying out Daily 5 this week!

If you know anything about me and my classroom, I LOVE cute, I LOVE bright and I LOVE fun when it comes to my classroom decor! For all these reasons I have created a Daily 5 Freebie that features a full page poster and half page poster for each Daily 5 (plus computers if you use that instead of or addition to the 5 rotations). Hopefully next week I'll have pictures of those up in my room, possibly as a clip-in system. I also will be extending this freebie to include CAFE as well, but that might not be until the summer, so if you want them for next year, keep your eyes open ;)

Click the image for a direct link or click here to go to the product page on my TPT store.

My FAVORITE thing to teach in reading is Fairy Tales. If you want to check out another post of mine on fairy tales check it out here.
This year I created a new castle for my kiddos ideas of fairy tale traits to fill. They did an awesome job this year, adding a new trait to my list: special helpers; and the only one from my list that they didn't come up with on their own was special numbers!

In addition to identifying the traits in a fairy tale, we are keeping track of the Cinderella stories we read to see which traits the different versions have or don't have.

We've been doing exit tickets after we read each story for the kiddos to compare and contrast the one we just read to another version. I realized that I haven't really used exit tickets yet this year (which made me a little upset with myself). The kiddos thought they were "so cool" especially the first time because they had to hand in a ticket before they could get their snack... oh the little things that keep kiddos happy!

In math, we started our geometry unit... 2D shapes, 3D shapes and partitioning. I introduced 2D shapes and found that my kiddos were very familiar with the different shapes, but were a little confused between trapezoids, rhombuses and parallelograms. We made this anchor chart together which goes into detail for each quadrilateral.

To give my kiddos even more practice with shapes, especially those tricky quadrilaterals, we made a shape book. You can grab yourself a copy here. Just copy double sided (with rotation on or make each page go the opposite way), fold down the middle and staple!

We FINALLY did the culmination of our shadows unit! We actually did it this past Friday, but I had already posted my 5 for Friday post, so I'm including it in this week's Five for Friday!

We went outside 4 different times and traced and measured our shadows so we could see how shadows move throughout the day. The kiddos (and I) had a blast!

They also did a great job figuring out why their shadows changed... granted we had read about shadows earlier in the year, but the fact that they could pretty much all tell me their shadows changed because the sun isn't in the same place in the sky during different times during the day and because the Earth is rotating. Yay for my kiddos!


And a little bonus...
Check out how fast these caterpillars are growing!!!! In just a week... it's incredible!

Have a wonderful weekend!