Maya's Morning Meeting and What's an Equation?

Greetings Friends! Another great day in second grade, started by our wonderful morning meeting helper, Maya! Loved your meeting Maya... and starting you message with "Greetings Best Friends"... priceless!
We "fancied up" our cards for Mrs. Cialek and can't wait to share them with her tomorrow! We've missed her while she was out sick, and truly look forward to her return! We had fun hunting for words in poems in word study.. and it was all about long e vowel sound! Students worked alone, or together (their choice) searching for words in our poems that share our word study principle, and were extremely excited to add them to our word list! FUN!
Math was all about equations... and looking at equations that have more than one addend on each side of the equals sign (and this truly rocked our world)!! You mean, you can say that 7+7=6+8... WHAT???? Is this true... 2+3=4+1.... HUH?? Using the scale, we demonstrated how 3+7 cubes equals 10 cubes... and 5+5 cubes equals 10 cubes as well, on the other side of the scale! MATH... SO AMAZING... WHO KNEW??? We ended our great day with Mr. Hines in Music... just the way we like it!!

Adan Starts the Morning and Olivia Starts Math!

Welcome back friends! Very exciting and busy day in second grade! Adan started us off with Chicken Lips (fun to sing, and so disgusting at the same time!), the koosh toss greeting, and the "acting out" game! Well done Adan! Very fun meeting, just the way we like it!
We also started with a new spelling principle... long e vowel sound (using vowel teams ee and ea, and silent e), and picked our spelling words. After writing our words on our homework, we began writing workshop!
Students were introduced to a new "think sheet" to help us with our writing! We talked about our weekend and used the think sheet to "map out" our ideas about what to write about! TJ shared his weekend writing with a wonderful story (and think sheet) that highlighted his family's love for "REAL" velvet cake! Well done TJ! Gotta admit, I share the "cake-love" when it comes to red velvet! Nice job sharing your writing with the class as well! We also talked about how important it is to be a "writer" during writing workshop! Well done second grade!
We were also treated to a connections lesson by Ms. McCarthy. she explained the different kinds of connections readers can make with a book they are reading... text to text, text to self, and text to world. Well done Ms. McCarthy, and the student participation was excellent friends! Nice!
We began math with Olivia D's math meeting (nice job Olivia!) and reviewed place value. Very tricky and important concept... where the digit is in the number is very important! Taking 3 digits, and rearranging them into a high and low number requires a lot of thinking! But we LIKE THINKING! WHEN YOU'RE THINKING, YOU'RE WINNING! Our 2W motto... words to live by!

FEAST... And Reflection!

The big day! Here at last! And what a feast it was!! We began the day with Rebecca's morning meeting where students decided to delight our guests with their very own version of the Sandwiches song, but replacing the word "turkeys" for "sandwiches" every time it was in the song! Awesome! Rebecca lead us in the scarf toss greeting, and a great game of "sparkle"! Well done Rebecca!
Handwriting was short and sweet... perfect number 9's all over, then it was time to prepare for our guests! Students did some light cleaning (as we all do when preparing for guests...) and set tables with helpings of cornbread, butter dishes, and beautiful linens for the tables! Oooooo did we look snappy today! We posted some signs around the room expressing our greetings and welcoming everyone, and then... they arrived! Ms. Easton, Ms. Zimnowski, Ms. Palmer, Mr. Merritt, Ms. Kuck, Ms. Luttenegger, Ms. Jordan, and even Ms. Gallerani popped in (one of our favorite sub/guest teachers... and she was in SES today... WOW)! We began with our song, and shared our thoughts about the first Thanksgiving (nice Mary); explained how we made the decisions about our celebration and what to cook (great job Olivia R); shared how we prepared our food, the peeling and chopping (well done Olivia, Maya, Mackenzie, TJ, Adan, and Rebecca); and Charlie even shared how much fun it was to be a chef (smelling onions on your fingers)! We loved every minute of it! Students were so happy to linger with their guests over hot delicious soup, sweet tasty cornbread with butter, and fresh delicious apple pie!
What a calm, relaxing, comfortable atmosphere to enjoy a delicious home made meal! I think we might have even broken some "2W records" today too! Did Olivia eat 4 bowls of soup? Did Adan really have 6 bowls? Did Rebecca say she had 3 pieces of pie? TJ did NOT just say he ate 3 apples... did he? And, was that Mackenzie and her 3rd piece of cornbread? Holy cow... best feast ever... for sure (but don't tell any alumni I said that)! Let's also recognize all the friends who "tried" food they weren't quite sure they'd like! Well done!
After our luxurious feast fest... we carefully cleaned our room from top to bottom! Very conscientious and responsible, and later joined together for some thoughtful reflection. Students described how delicious the soup tasted, how surprised they were that Ms. G. was actually there (Wow!), how much food we all devoured, and how much we missed Lannashia and wished she were there with us! What a memorable and truly very special day (even if Squanto and Massasoit weren't able to make it)!!
Today was all about the feast, friendship, cooperation and working together, with a little bit of history to boot!
Tomorrow... half day, noon dismissal (no lunch served). We will be treated to a very special puppet performance in the morning, and enjoy our last visit with Chris, our guest-reader from the Red Hawk's Frontier Football Team!

Peter's Morning Meeting and Look Who's Cooking!!

Greetings and Feastings!! That's right, 2W prepared for our annual feast today, and let me tell you... we've got a lot of culinary enthusiasts in our class! First we started with Peter's morning meeting and it was a good one! Pinky handshake greeting, She'll Be Coming Around the Mountain, and the "acting out" game! FUN!! Thanks Peter, you made some great meeting choices! After meeting, we reviewed our spelling rule from last week, since we only have 2 days to work with spelling, so we added some real challenging words to our spelling cards! We put our word study principle into the middle and ends of words, and did multi-syllable words too! We even added "eigh" as another way to make the long a vowel sound! Well done "neighbors", well done!
After snacking, we washed our hands and launched into feast preparations! Everyone had their hands in the action... making apple pie with Mrs. Cialek, and making vegetable soup with Ms. Worthley! We learned how to cut safely, how to peel our fruits and veggies, and talked a little about what our thanksgiving celebration might be like! We invited our Sunderland Elementary "family" to join us tomorrow, and talked about how this is going to be the "best feast EVER"! Let me just say, if you haven't asked your student to join you in the kitchen.... YOU SHOULD!! We have some very enthusiastic cooks in our midst, talking about chopping, and smells, and tastes, and how to balance our food and flavors... I was very impressed! We should save some time for cooking in our future, because we LOVED IT!!!
We can't wait to prepare our room for our guests tomorrow, and partake in our meal together! Nicely done second graders! I'm sure we will have a very memorable feast, perhaps not a 3 day long feast with venison, wrestling matches, and Massasoit, but a delicious and memorable one indeed!
Today was also Olivia D's first math meeting, and she handled her first day like a pro! Well done Olivia! We watched a brief but very entertaining movie called William Bradford from the American Hero series of Discovery films, and reinforced our learning about the pilgrims and their struggle to settle in this new land. We saw how Massasoit and William Bradford created a treaty together, and how successful this relationship was in the very beginning! We ended the day in computers writing thank you notes to PTO for the beautiful new picnic tables they generously donated to our school! WOW! Thanks PTO! How lucky are we?! Much to be thankful for, indeed!