Week 9

Nine weeks down already!  Reports card went home and conferences will be next week.  We worked on adding some more artwork/writing to our hallway.  We made footprint ghosts and wrote an acrostic poem for the word GHOST.  We also worked on synonyms this week and made synonym candy corn and "spooks" to hang up to replace our antonym ants we had worked on previously.  In math we reviewed place value with a spooky place value game and we started Regrouping!  I was very pleased at how well the students did!  We did several different formats to understand regrouping from using unifix cubes to using magnets to visualize the concept of regrouping.  We also worked problems out on our white boards showing regrouping and how to "carry to the attic".  The students are doing very well!  In grammar we worked on singular and plural possessive nouns and our spelling words for the week contain the vowel teams of oe, oa, and ow.

Ghostly Acrostic Poetry

 

 

Spooky Place Value

 

 

 Spooktacular Synonyms

Week 8

This week in 2nd grade, we finished our chapter on data and graphs for math.  Next week we'll be starting 2-digit addition first with no regrouping, then regrouping!  We kept taking about vowel teams, especially ai and ay.  Several of our spelling words contained ai/ay.  We also wrapped up our chapter about plants in science.  In grammar we talked about correct ways to write abbreviations and we also discussed contractions.  We even played a candy corn contraction game.  For writing, we wrote about our "mummies" and made paper plate mummies with toilet paper and google eyes!

 

Week 7

This week in 2nd grade, we talked about antonyms.  We discussed how antonyms are words that mean the opposite or almost the opposite.  We even made "antonym ants".  The students got a word and wrote that word on their ant.  Then they had to look up antonyms for their word on a dictionary app on our ipads.  They had to find two antonyms for their word and write them on their ant also. Then we colored them and hung them up on our lockers.  Besides antonyms, we also discussed proper punctuation and letter writing for grammar.  We also wrote Halloween stories and published them.  The students drew out of a bucket for a character, setting, and two verbs that needed to be included in their stories.  As we are working on developing our writing, the students needed to have two paragraphs for their stories this time.  I'm pretty impressed at some of our writing abilities!  In math, we are working on interpreting data and making pictographs and bar graphs.  We also talked about Christopher Columbus and watched a video on his important voyage and why we celebrate the holiday Columbus Day.  In science, we wrapped up our chapter on plants with a test to come this week.  Our grass in our greenhouses sprouted and the students were able to take them home.

 

Our Antonym Ants!

Week 6

This past week in 2nd Grade, we went green...green thumb that is!  Plants was the topic for both reading and science.  We learned about parts of a plant and what each part does, plus we did a couple of experiments.  We put celery in cups filled with colored water and waited and watched how the stem of the celery acts like a straw.  After a few days we could see the water in the cup going down and the leaves changing to the color of the water!

 

For reading, we read Eric Carle's "The Tiny Seed".  We found out some other interesting facts about seeds and plants.

 

Then we made our own "greenhouses".  We cut the greenhouse out of construction paper and used a Ziploc bag as the "window".  After decorating them, we dipped a cotton ball in water and put grass seed on the wet cotton ball.  We put our seeds in the Ziploc bag and taped the bag into the inside of the greenhouse.  Then we hung our greenhouses in the window so the sun will shine on our seeds and after a while, we should be able to see them sprout!

 (Now we just need some sun after the last few days of clouds and rain!)

 

One other project we worked on this week was making bats to hang in our room to help decorate it for the month of October.  We took black construction paper and traced our hands on it with a white crayon.  We cut the hands out to use as the wings of our bats.  Then we cut out a body for our bats.  Some children chose circles for the body, others chose squares or hearts.  We also cut out two triangles for the ears.  Then we glued our bats together and added wiggle eyes and drew on a face.

"Spooktacular"!