Day two

Today was a great day in second grade!  The highlight of our day was meeting Mrs. Munch.  The kids absolutely LOVED her.  Mrs. Munch is a flip top garbage can converted into a frog. She's a real wild frog who loves to eat. Mrs Munch is very picky and only eats certain things.  She often eats sound patterns such as long vowels or certain sound chunks such as tion.  The kids have to figure out what her rule of the day is based on what she will eat and what she refuses.  Today she was eating bad classroom behaviors.  The kids fed her post it notes with words written on them. If it was an inappropriate classroom behavior Mrs. Munch willingly ate it.  She refused to eat things such as raise your hand or put your supplies away.  The kids were quick to figure out what she wanted to eat and we had a good discussion about the behaviors we want in our classroom.

Another highlight of our day was reader's workshop.  Today we learned about how readers have stamina.  Stamina is being able to do something for a long time.  We practiced reading independently from our self selected books.  We read a book about Booker T. Washington titled More Than Anything Else.  It's about Booker's desire to learn to read more than anything else in this world.  We saw how he had stamina and never gave up on his dream to become a reader. 

During writer's workshop today we read a book called Something to Tell the Grandcows.  It is a story about a cow aboard Admiral Bird's South pole expedition in 1933.  We talked about how everyone has a story to tell.  We don't have to go on grand adventures in order to have a story to tell.  We also talked about writer's workshop expectations.  The kids were excited to get their writing notebooks and enjoyed having some time to write.

Math was a blast today.  We explored all the different manipulatives in the classroom and got to work independently and with partners.  I love the creativity that kids have.  One group spelled their names with math rods and then counted how many rods it took to make their names.  Another group grabbed buttons and played estimation games and then counted to verify their answers.  Some built with math base 10 blocks and practiced counting large quantities.  We also learned to skip count by 3's today and worked on multiplication of 3's. 

Our special today was art class.  Mr. Oaks is our art teacher this year.  On Fridays he comes to our classroom for art class.  Since this was our first art class  Mr. Oaks reviewed art class expectations and then the kids drew pictures and practiced using the supplies respectfully and responsibly. 

We ended our day with a brief, but much needed playground break.  =) 

I will be posting pictures of our first two days of school soon.  Be sure to check back soon.