Singing Songs

Last year several staff-members from our building went to PD with Tim Rasinski.  He’s huge on building reading fluency and one thing he suggests is singing songs.  So since then I’ve had fun finding songs for my second graders to sing each day.  I put together some that I found for Halloween.  If you want to grab them up for free, just click {HERE} or on the picture below.

 Here are some of the songs.

If you download the file you’ll see the website I found the songs at.

Do you have any fun fall songs you’re singing with your class?

Native Americans

Yesterday I was one of those huge nerds that work super late on a Friday.  When I was walking to my car that was in the middle of an empty parking lot I was inventing a new meaning of the phrase "walk of shame".  But I did accomplish something that gave me a pretty nice sense of satisfaction.  I updated/revamped my personal unit for Native Americans.  A while back I created units (and by units I mean rough day-by-day plans) for all of my Social Studies, Science and Math units.  Each year I use them again and add/edit a little, but this year we got a new "textbook" which is an online textbook from Success Net Plus.  As a side note, I'm really excited about having this as a new resource but I'm feeling a little bit of a learning curve because their little PD introduction to the product wasn't as helpful as one would hope.  Anyway. . . I updated my unit to include this new resource and just revamped the whole thing.  

I'm kind of a create units kick because of chapter 2 in Never Work Harder than your Students, which we're reading for my school's book club for teachers.  It's ok.  It's somewhat useful, somewhat repetetive, a teeny condescending at times.  We'll see how the rest goes.

So. . . back to Native Americans.  Monday we're starting off by reading Scholastic News about Columbus Day.  I know.  It's a week late but we were wrapping up Life Cycles stuff for the end of the quarter.  And better, late than never, right?  Plus I felt like it's kind of a perfect way to launch into this unit and then I can let Thanksgiving tie the unit up with a perfect little bow.  :)  I'm excited.  Can you tell?  

We're also going to watch BrainpopJr's video on Columbus Day (which is free, so you can watch it even if your district doesn't subscribe) and, if we have time we'll watch another video from United Streaming titled Holiday Facts & Fun: Columbus Day.  It might sound a little video-y, but I love letting my students watch videos for Social Studies & Science both.  They are so much more engaging than the standard textbook (another reason to be excited for our online textbook!).

Speaking of videos we'll watch several more videos from United Streaming throughout the unit.  In my district the focus for second grade is Woodland and Plains Indians.  In addition to videos, I plan on doing some group activities, creating tortilla teepees (or maybe cupcake teepees), and doing the cute things I've whipped up in my Native Americans pack which is on TPT.  Here are some of the things we'll do:

Get these activities for your classroom by clicking {HERE} or on the picture below.

 

I'm thinking, too, of doing some craftivities, but I haven't figured out what to do yet.  I'm going to do some searching on Pinterest and TPT. If you find anything cute online, leave the link to it in the comment, please.  I'd love that.  

What fun activities do you do for Native Americans?  What fun things do you do for Thanksgiving?

Just in case you're wondering where I got all the cute clip art and fonts from for my Native American things, here are the credits:

Clip art by:

 Tales from Outside the Classroom

http://talesfromoutsidetheclassroom.blogspot.com

http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Middle-Grades-Maven

www.middlegradesmaven.blogspot.com

www.scrappindoodles.com

Fonts by:

http://www.kevinandamanda.com/fonts/

Life Cycles

This week we wrapped up our life cycles unit.  This is a really fun unit for the kids because we watch butterflies go through most of their life cycle.  A little bummer this year, though - only one of our caterpillars actually made it to being a butterfly.  Here is that lucky guy:

To review the life cycle of chickens we made foldable pyramids like so (fold on the lines, cut on the dashed lines):

Then, on the inside of the pyramids students drew and labeled the life cycle of chickens.  They turned out really cute and I was surprised by how my kids didn't struggle with constructing the pyramids.  

 

So fun!

Fun Friday Tomorrow!

I.  Love.  Fridays. 

How 'bout you? 

I love that we usually get to wear jeans.  I love the excitement of the weekend coming up.  It's the weekly equivalent to Christmas Eve.  It's great.

I'm even more excited for tomorrow because I have a few fun things planned for tomorrow.  

In English Language Arts we are going to work on synonym rolls using the whole "synonym roll" theme that you've probably seen on Pinterest.  Finally in First offered a cute freebie I'll be using for this.  And I got some delish cinnamon rolls for them to snack on while they work! 

Then, later in the afternoon for Math we're going to do M&M math.  I got fun-sized M&Ms for my kids to add, subtract, estimate, divide and eat, of course!  

My kids are going to just love me sending their kids home all sugared up.  :)

What fun things do you do with food in your class?

Working from Nouns to Paragraphs

At the beginning of the year I like build my second graders into writing paragraphs in a methodical way.  Last year I really focused on reminding kids about nouns and verbs, used that to help kids be able to recognize and write complete sentences and finally taught them how to plan and compose a paragraph. 

I had terrific results and fast when I used this method last year.  My kids could easily whip up a paragraph for the rest of the year and I even noticed an improvement in their quality of their test answers.  

So this year I'm reusing the method I used last year and I decided to whip up some cute activities for my kids to do to practice these things.

I made a flipbook to reinforce the idea of nouns being a person, place, thing or idea.  We did these today and I was really impressed with my kids' thinking on these.  I wondered if the idea part would be tricky but they took it in stride.  You can get this flipbook for free here or by clicking on the picture.

I also made this fun little tent for action and being verbs.  Kids do a pretty good job remembering that verbs are action words but the being verbs are a little trickier, so I thought this would help them.

 

In addition to these I made a little pocketbook for students to differentiate between nouns and verbs.

If you are interested in these activities plus tons more, including sentence and paragraph writing activities, click here to check out my Nouns, Verbs, Sentences and Paragraphs pack. 

How do you teach writing?  

 

A peek at my classroom

I have to tell you, blogs have totally rejuvenated my teaching!  I only just discovered the blogosphere and TPT last winter and it has made a big impact on how I teach.  One way it has influenced me is in the way my classroom now looks.  I'm not naturally a creative person but seeing so many amazing classrooms motivated me to do something with my room.  One particular post from Schoolgirl Style really lit the fire under me and over the summer I dreamed up what I wanted my room to look like, made some purchases and threw it all together.  Let me show you some of my room.

Melanie from Schoolgirl convinced me I needed a cohesive color scheme so I chose turquoise and red.  Dots on turquoise from Creative Teaching press was perfect for this.

This picture shows my Daily 5/Cafe Menu.  I created the Cafe menu this summer and it goes perfectly with my scheme.  

 I made a turquoise curtain to hide storage.  I hang my anchor charts in front of this.  I'll admit, my anchor charts are blah.

This is my calendar math area.  I do half of my calendar math here, the rest on the Smartboard.  Also, on the left of this picture you can see my schedule.  I was pretty pleased with myself for creating these.  :)

 

 I made red curtains with turquoise trim.

 I created these cute turquoise labels for lunch count.  Also, below that is my sign-out for restrooms.

Another shot of my curtains.

This is the bulletin board by the door as kids walk in.  I'm kind of in love with the turquoise pom.

 

The view from my desk across the room.  I made poms to hang above each table and used Lindsey Haralson's table labels.

This is my word wall.  I got it as a freebie from Samantha Halbert on teacher appreciation day and am in love with it.  It would totally be worth the cost.

What do you think?  Did I pull off the turquoise/red scheme?

Apologies and a Freebie!

So clearly I am a terrible, terrible blogger.  It has been forever since I blogged.  I suck.  To be honest, I have too many technical difficulties when I try to create a post.  But we recently gave in to our desires and bought a MacBook Pro.  Let me just say, I.  Love.  It.  I hope it eliminates some of my problems that I've been struggling with.  We'll see.  

Anyway, I was inspired to create a Number of the Day page to go along with my calendar math time.  I love calendar math.  I was skeptical at first.  Someone told me it was for the little kiddies so I thought second grade didn't need it.  Then we started doing it and I quickly saw the benefits.  I'm not sure whether I'll actually use this page that I've created but I'll definitely try it out.  I like the idea of the kids doing it during morning work time and then having them bring it with them to calendar math.  Normally we just do everything orally, together.  I'm kind of atypical, in that instead of asking one kiddo to answer a question, I usually try to let the entire class say the answer out loud.  The hope is that more kids will be engaged.  

Enough rambling.  Here is my freebie.  Please accept it as my penance for sucking as a blogger.  :)