A quick walk through the past few months ... HUGE Picture Update!

So, it has taken me quite some time, but with the help of my husband I was finally able to figure out why my phone pictures were not being uploaded to my computer.  So, I am going to do an update that goes back to sometime in February (so sorry) but it will be pictures with captions.  Hopefully with my phone updated correctly now, I will be able to do our weekly posts again for the rest of the school year.  Thanks so much for being patient!

Playing Kickball with Mrs. Sonneville's class for P.E.

A beautiful rainbow that many of the kids thought was great that it "ended" at the playground.

Watching "Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory" after finishing the novel.

Popcorn to go with the movie

First, the students had to describe popcorn by using adjectives

Enjoying their hard work!

Post Office and Kelseyville High School Field Trip

Post office Field Trip - back of the post office in Kelseyville

The class outside of the post office

Continuing our field trip on the same day; we went to KHS cafeteria and were able to see where our food comes from - Brrr: The refrigerator!

And of course even colder.... the Freezer!

Lake County Ag Days Field Trip

Field trip to 1st Annual Lake County Ag Days

Finding Earth Worms

Animal Pelts

identifying parts of plants

Picking up walnuts

   

    Just "bugging" around!

Playing in corn

   some animals

 Making wool beads

Watching how electricity is brought into towns and cities

Baby goat 

Just some word fun!

Listening to Miss Sherrie read to us on how to handle stress

Weaving

To go along with one of our stories, the students learned how to weave using yarn and a loom.

Marble painting...

....for the 2nd grade bulletin.  Each 2nd grade class did a different medium on their butterflies.  Ours are on the far right side.

Science - Pollinators (with of course, bees!)

Students dipped their bees in different colored pollen and then flew on to others to see how flowers became pollinated

Some pollen mixing!

Observations in their notebooks to show what happened after each bee pollinated each of the 3 different flowers.

Chinese Acrobats Assembly

Planning the "perfect" garden in groups

Preparation for Earth Day

Our Piggy structure for our class Angry Birds display for the Earth Day Recycled Art Gallery...all made out of toilet paper tubes

Field Trip to Taylor Observatory

controlling Dash Robots

Using an augmented reality machine... 

.... to make maps in the sand that responded to the students moving the sand

Earth Day

We got to see a demonstration of the recycling done in Lake County

flying kites for the kite festival as part of Earth Day

Our class Earth Day ABCs " Quilt

Wow! Hope you enjoy all of the pictures.  It has been a really busy couple of months!  Have a great weekend and enjoy the sun!

All Words... No Pictures

First of all, I deeply apologize for the big space of the last couple weeks with no post to the blog.  This time of the school year between parent-teacher conferences, report cards, and special events always keeps me very busy.  Also, there will not be any pictures on this post because my phone (aka my camera) will not connect with my computer and I will need to troubleshoot this when I am not trying to get a post up for people to read.
This last week in second grade we had a field trip and two minimum days.  The week seems to have gone by very quickly.  Our minimum days were to allow me time to meet with parents for conferences and I am happy to say I was able to meet with a good portion of the class.
For our field trip, we walked to the Post Office.  Round trip it ended up being 3.64 miles.  Both the students and myself were pretty tired by the time we got back to the classroom.  It was such a warm, sunny day and it made for a nice trip.  In going to the Post Office we were able to learn about some of the people who work in our community.  Beforehand, each student had written a friendly letter to another student in the class.  We discussed the different parts of the letter: heading, greeting, body, closing, and signature.  Students learned how to address an envelope and each received a stamp.  While at the Post Office, the students were able to see what the back of the inside of the building looks like.  They were also able to learn the process of how mail is sorted and prepared for delivery.  The students learned that live animals, such as the baby chicks we heard, can also be sent in the mail!  Towards the end of the trip, the students mailed their letters to their classmates.  I suspect most students have either gotten their letters already or should get them by tomorrow afternoon.
As part of this field trip, we also walked to the high school and had lunch at the "BIG" cafeteria.  While we were there, the students had a chance to go through the kitchen and see where all of their school food is made.  The biggest highlight was, of course, the giant freezer that was 0 degrees.  (Hopefully I can figure out the picture-issue I am having, and you can see their excited faces in the freezer.)
Our story for Language Arts this week was "Penguin Chick."  It was a very interesting non-fiction story that the class absolutely loved!  To tie in with that story, one of the kindergarten teachers at our school has been incubating chicken eggs for the last 3 weeks and this last week they hatched!  So we definitely had to go and see the cute chicks!  The timing was perfect and helped the students make the connection even greater with how penguins emerge from their eggs.  (By the way, I apologize if this brings on a sudden interest in your child to get an egg or baby chick.  Many were very excited when they heard how the eggs were purchased on mypetchicken.com)
Each of the students in my class definitely deserves a round of applause because the last few weeks have been crazy and busy!  We have been doing assessments for report cards and the students worked incredibly hard.  They made it through another session of assessment and now we have only one more set.  It seems already as though the year as flown by and in the meantime, we continue to prepare for third grade!

Upcoming Dates:

- Spring Break: April 3 - April 7

- Ocean Field Trip (we still need parents with fingerprints, etc.) - Friday, May 19th

A week of Special Events!

Between Valentine's Day celebrations and the KES Talent Show, we had a very fun-filled week.  On Tuesday, for Valentine's Day, we had a fun little class party.  We also were able to see the kindergarten classes perform their Valentine songs in the morning.  Tuesday was a very fun day and you could definitely feel the love in the classroom.

Passing out Valentine Cards

All of the yummy treats we had at our class party

Getting our Valentine bags ready

On Wednesday afternoon the class was able to see the first dress rehearsal of the KES Talent Show.  There were about 15 different acts that consisted of singing, dancing, gymnastics, and Poi.  The class loved the show and was very impressed with their fellow students.  Many of the students are looking forward to the evening performance of our Talent Show that will be held this coming Wednesday night (Feb. 22nd) at 6:30 pm.

This week we also had one of the school nurses come in and give us a lesson about hand washing.  The school nurses are holding a hand washing campaign in order to help combat some of the germs and illnesses that are continually spread throughout the classroom.  The class had a chance to use a black light and see the germs that were on their hands.  So immediately afterwards, we did some good hand washing practice.  We love that the nurses are so dedicated to our students at KES.

In our classroom, we have also been improving our technology skills.  This week students had opportunities to use our newest program EasyTech through learning.com, as well as continuing our typing skills on typing.com.
This last week was definitely not a typical week in our classroom, but we certainly had fun this last week.  With today (Monday) being a holiday, this next week may not be completely back to normal but it will be closer.  I hope everyone is enjoying the three-day weekend, despite all of the rain!

Data, Graphing, and Science Investigations

I will start by apologizing for not getting a post up last week.  The end of the week hit and I somehow ran out of time, so I told myself I would do it Sunday evening and then that didn't happen either.  So this post, hopefully shouldn't be too long, but will cover the last two weeks in the classroom.
We finished up our Graphing and Data unit in math.  For our culminating project the students created group graphs based on their own surveys.  We had many that asked about favorite movies and we also had a couple groups that asked about other favorites.  The process involved the students creating a survey and then asking that survey among each of the class members and collecting the data.  Then as a group they created a bar graph to represent their data.  The students worked very hard on these and it was quite exciting to see the results.

Surveying the class

The finished products --- all 6 bar graphs

In science, we finished off the investigations involving erosion.  The students were given a tower of sand and they had to create a device to prevent water AND wind erosion.  Each group did not have much to work with.... one piece of string, some foil, one coffee filter, a piece of mesh cloth, 4 large popsicle sticks, and 2 small popsicle sticks.  

After the structures were built, each group was given an eye dropper with water to be the "rain," and each student was given a plastic straw to be the "wind."  Once all of the "erosion" was complete, we removed the structures and the students made observations in their science notebooks about how much of a change occurred between the two types of erosion to their sand tower.

For this current week I don't have near as many pictures as I thought, but we did quite a bit in the classroom this week.  Our new unit in math is focusing on numbers to 1,000 and we have been writing these numbers in expanded notation, word form, and representing them using blocks, sticks, and cubes.  The students have also been working on projects in our Google CS-First curriculum.  We were able to complete activity 3 today using the scratch.mit.edu platform.  It is incredible to think that February is almost half-way done.  The coming weeks we will be doing a lot in the classroom.  

As a side note, a permission slip was sent home this week for our walking field trip to the Kelseyville Post Office.  These permission slips are due on Feb. 23rd.  Also the trip itself is on Thursday, March 9th, which is a minimum day.  The permission slip says we will arrive back at the school at 1pm, but that is not correct.  We will be back to the school by 12pm, so that students will still be dismissed at 12:20.  A note is going home about this on Monday.  So sorry for any confusion this may have caused.

Have a wonderful weekend!