The kids were so excited today when I announced that it was time for writer's workshop.  Many commented that it is their favorite time of the day.  I love to see a passion for writing already starting to develop.  We've been working on adding power words to our writing.  Power words are words that add energy and excitement to our writing.  Sometimes we call them juicy words.  This week we have focused on adding sound words.  We've got quite a list of sound words collecting on our anchor chart; words like boom, bang, crash, pop, and oops. 

During reader's workshop we have been talking a lot about the importance of metacognition.  Reading is thinking.  We need to be aware of the thinking going on in our brains.  As readers we need to be deep thinkers. Today we talked about our schema.  Schema is everything you know and all the experiences you've had.  Great readers activate their schema to help them understand what they are reading.  We read Jamaica Tag Along today and made connections to our schema. 
The children received their reader's notebooks this week.  We did our first quick write today.  A quick write is a 10 minute write time that follows our reader's workshop.  It is a time for children to think and write about their thinking connected to their reading.  Our notebooks become a showcase of our thinking and learning and are an important part of who we are becoming as readers.

During our vocabulary lesson today we focused on the words content and compassionate.  Our discussion was quite powerful.  We talked about children around the world who live in poverty and how we can show them compassion.  This lead to a great discussion about being content with what we have as well.  Our class would like to participate in a program called Operation Christmas Child as an extension of this lesson.  This program collects small toys, school supplies, toothbrushes and other such toiletries, and small items that can be placed in shoe boxes.  Shoe boxes are filled with the items and then sent around the world to children living in poverty.  It is a wonderful program that helps the children learn not only about the world, but also about the importance of helping others.  I will be sending home more information next week. 

We finished up our first unit in math today.  Our lessons this week have focused a lot on place value.  We reviewed math symbols such as  < and > and applied those to place value.  We have also been working a lot with balancing equations.  Learning the skip counting 6 song  has also been another highlight of our math week.  We can now count by 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 9 and 10's.  The children are starting to apply their skip counting skills to multiplication and division. 

Many of our pupae are now completing their metamorphosis and beetles are beginning to emerge.  It has truly been exciting watching them break free.  The children have made many wonderful and exciting observations and are learning a lot about the life cycle of insects.  Later this week we will be introduced to milkweed eggs.

Learning together is so much fun!  I think we're all loving second grade.