Someone New in Our Room

On Monday, an elf turned up in our room. We found him at the back table reading the Polar Express! We weren't so sure what to think of him at first. We wondered if he was an elf on the shelf, but NO he is a real elf that reports back to Santa. We named him Elfie.

This morning, Tuesday, we found him by the computer. He had typed an email to Santa! After that, we knew that Elfie HAD to be real! 

The kids excitedly reading the email to Santa.

Happy St. Nicholas Day

Today we got a visit from St. Nicholas, actually 2 visits. First when we came to school, St. Nick had put some candy in our shoes/slippers that we made. Then while we were doing math, St. Nick himself stopped by with Mrs. Huff and gave us candy canes and a prayer card. It was so cool to see him! I think the kids really enjoyed it too.

The Weird School Books

The new obsession in our classroom is the My Weird School Daze Books. We read the first book, Miss Daisy is Crazy and the second book, Mr. Sunny is Funny. These books are from the point of view of a second grader, AJ. They're short chapter books that I read aloud to the class once a day. The kids LOVE it! I think they're pretty funny too :)
After we read the first too books, we wrote who was the most interesting character and why.

Forgiveness Plays

In December we will be making our First Reconciliation! Since we've been preparing for this sacrament and talking about sins and forgiveness, I thought it would be a good idea to have the kids act out some scenes. They did a great job!
First the kids worked in pairs to work on the scripts!
Some examples were fighting over books, accidentally hitting someone, and hitting someone because they were mad (these were all pretend, of course!). I think the kids enjoyed it and it helped some of them better understand the meaning of forgiveness.

Picture Lady - Turkey Edition

On Friday, Mrs. Kammerer and Mrs. Tapp came in and taught us about the artist, Pablo Picasso! During D.E.A.R. time we also read the story "When Pigasso met Mootisse." The kids really liked the story and it helped us learn about the two painter's different painting styles. The students also created their own Thanksgiving Turkey's with water color paint and scrap paper.

Bar graphs

Last week the students surveyed each other and used tally marks. This week they surveyed each other using bar graphs.

Noun books

This past couple weeks we've been working on nouns and adjectives. To help us with nouns, we created  Noun Books.

Fall Nature Detectives

On Friday, we went outside and recorded our observations about fall and the differences we noticed since the summer season. The students noticed the cooler temperature, gray clouds instead of blue skies, brown leaves instead of green, some trees had no leaves, and they discovered rocks and dry mulch. Here are some photos of us being detectives and observing!

Adjectives

We are currently working on identifying nouns and adjectives. To enforce this, we thought of adjectives that described us and made self portraits with those adjectives.

D.E.A.R. Time

Sometimes we also do partner reading.

Every day after lunch we have D.E.A.R. Time (Drop Everything and Read). I do a read aloud and we practice identifying things such as main characters, settings, plot, adjectives, nouns, etc. Then the children go off by themselves and work on that particular strategy.

Surveys and Tallys

In Math, we are working on taking surveys and using tally marks. The students created their own surveys and questioned their classmates. They ranged from favorite NFL teams, favorite stories, favorite candy to favorite cereal! Here are some examples:

Working on Plots

We've been working on figuring out story plots. They consist of the beginning of the story, the middle, and the end. We created "roller coasters" to help us remember how the plot is written.