Ah... life is good in second grade!  What fun we've been having learning together!  Today was our very first Frog Shop.  The kids were SO excited to shop for treasures with their payday earnings.  There are so many great life lessons learned through Frog Shop.  The kids learn to work hard for their earnings, to count money, make change, make good shopping decisions, and to save for bigger purchases.  We'll have the Frog Shop open twice a month.

The weather has been beautiful this week and we've taken the opportunity to enjoy it a couple of times.  Earlier this week we took our writing outside and spent some time doing our writer's workshop out in the sunshine.  Another day we went out and collected sticks for our insect habitats.  We had a great time building the habitats for our milkweed bug eggs.  We got to watch one hatch under our document camera and that was so totally cool! 

Our read alouds this week have been awesome.  We read Thank You Mr. Falker on Wednesday.  This is the story of a young girl who struggles to learn to read.  It is an incredibly powerful book about determination, compassion, and hard work.  It is a true story based on the life of the author, Patricia Polacco.  We also read another wonderful book about hard work called A Day's Work by Eve Bunting.  This is the story of a migrant worker and his grandson who seek work, but make a big mistake by pulling out the plants and leaving the weeds at the gardening job they get.  The young boy learns a powerful lesson about hard work, honesty, and commitment.  These two stories lead to some great discussions and life discoveries.  Earlier in the week we read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day.  This book introduced us to the reading strategy of making connections from the text to our own lives.  We call these text to self connections.  We took what we learned in this book about making connections and applied it to our other read alouds later in the week.  The kids also learned how to use post it notes to track their thinking as they read.   Many have begun making connections and tracking those connections on post it notes.  It's exciting to see them taking ownership of their learning. 

Our focus in writer's workshop this week has been on using punctuation and capital letters. You may have heard that Sunshine came to visit us on Wednesday.  Sunshine is my ventriloquist dummy.  She wrote a story and brought it to share with the class.  Unfortunately she had forgotten all her punctuation.  The kids really enjoyed helping her out and helping her fix her writing.  They are already asking when she will come back to visit us again. 

We have been working on the words there and their in spelling, as well as said, do, you and your.  There and their are challenging.  We've learned some songs to help us remember when to use each of them.  In addition, we have been working with the ch, th, sh, wh, gh, and ph sound chunks. 

Our math focus this week has been on addition strategies.  Today we worked on the Mr. Nine strategy. Mr. Nine always wants to be a 10 so he steals one away from the number next to him.  He becomes a ten stick and the other number is left one smaller. So, 9 steals one from 7.  He becomes a ten and only six are left next door making an answer of 16.  The kids enjoyed playing domino top it to practice their addition skills as well. 

 We are busy, busy, busy learning all day long and having a grand time doing it!  I will try to post more pictures this weekend so check back soon.