Getting Crafty!

Since I am playing catch up I am going to attempt to highlight a few of this past fall's activities in one post!  Here we go....

October, for being a long month, went by in the blink of an eye.  Here are some of the highlights!:

We were in the depths of our place value unit and did lots of hard work investigating and dissecting numbers.  We discovered all the different ways to represent numbers, compared numbers, and rounded numbers.  

Here are some of my students completing Amy Lemon's Peekin' at Place Value activity from her incredible Number Knowledge packet.  The students loved getting up and moving around to record their answers

We also worked hard on rounding.  Since it was so close to Halloween I thought a craft was definitely necessary!  I was perusing Amy Lemon's awesome blog Step into Second Grade (her site has been a fantastic help for this new-to-second-grade teacher).  I saw that she had used Cara Carroll's adorable, FREE bat template to sort addition and subtraction.  So we used it to make these cute little guys to decorate our hallways.  I had the students sort their numbers by those they should round down and those that should round up.

You can get my rounding numbers document HERE. 

I also created my first item for Teachers Pay Teachers around this time.  Rounding on the Roller coaster can be used whole group or in centers.  Students must sort between numbers you would round up and numbers you would round down.   

I used the roller coaster graphic as one of my visuals (along with a rounding 100s chart and number lines).  I would draw my roller coaster cart up to the four and point out that if the cart stopped there it would roll back to the last group of ten.  If our cart stopped on the five at the top it would round all the way to the next group of ten.  You can get this activity for FREE on my TpT site HERE!

Around that same time we also spent some time researching different types of spiders.  Again, I have the incredible Amy Lemons to thank!  My students absolutely LOVED this activity.  We paired up and researched on the computer.  They also filled out the "If I was a spider..." writing activity that week during Daily 5.  Here's the LINK to the resource.

We were studying matter at this time as well, so of course we had to make some Oobleck!  Since Halloween is such a crazy, hyped up day anyway, why not do it then!?! ;)  The kids had a blast turning their oobleck from solid to liquid and back again many times.  It was my first time making it and even though I most definitely was not my custodian's favorite person that day, it is on my list of things to do every year!

I know I said I was going to do all of fall in one post, but whew!  Just October made for a really long post!  I promise to post our awesome turkeys and Santa letters soon!  I. will. get. caught. up!!  (Fingers crossed)

New Year's Resolution

#1 - Get my blogging caught up!  That is a big task, but since tomorrow will be my second consecutive snow day I should be able to get a head start!

This is what I woke up to this morning!  For a Michigan girl, this is nothing, but here in Virginia it is enough to close down school for at least two days!

My kids were super excited to get outside to play!  It was still very cold, but that did not deter them at all.  We all had a blast this morning!

Okay, so now I need to rewind all the way back to late September/early October.  We were busy with everything magnets.  My students loved experimenting with the magnetic field and anything that might have a chance of sticking to the magnet!

Here they were seeing if the items in their bags were magnetic or not.  They first had to record their predictions, then test it and record their results.  They loved everything with magnets and were constantly coming up with items to test throughout the unit.

A couple of weeks later we were reviewing the types of sentences we had learned so far this school year.  I loved this great idea from Amy Lemons over at Step into Second Grade.  She has this fabulous packet called Strengthen Your Sentences in her TpT store.  I loved her punctuation cards and example sentences.  I copied the punctuation cards in different colors (yellow periods, blue question marks and green exclamation marks) and we did a group activity so I could quickly assess their understanding.  I put the example sentences on the Promethean board and students held up the punctuation they would use.

My smarties even picked out a couple sentences and discussed how the sentence could have either a period or an exclamation mark.  Then we practiced reading the sentence both ways.

We also had a school-wide reading day where we paired up with a fourth grade class to partner read a bit.  It was so much fun to see all the students so engaged while READING!  Love it!

Whew!  I will end my lengthy post there, but will be working to get caught up with some more posts soon!