Haiku!

HAIKU! God bless you... thank you! Hey! Poetry in second grade is nothing to sneeze at! Especially when trying our hand at Haiku, a beautiful, rhythmic, Japanese style of poetry! Students wrote Haiku together, and then tried writing our own Haiku poems too! After writing workshop, poets shared some of their own Haiku poems! Everything from seasons, to 2W, to weather, to Doughnut Man? Poetry continues all week as we dabble with different styles, and write from the heart, like poets do! Madelene has hosted great math meetings all week, and Katie and Kirsten held entertaining morning meetings as well! In math students showed off all their learning from our geometry unit! Knowing about 2D and 3D shapes, sides, edges, vertices, angles (corners),quadrilaterals, hexagons, and polygons (just to name a few)... along with an understanding of halves, thirds and fourths... and equal parts! All this is just some of what we learned in geometry, but we sure learned how much we LOVE geometry! 2W also talked about what a special place our classroom is, how important our learning is, and how we only have about 20-something days left together! Getting a good night's rest and coming to school prepared for learning is the best homework a second grade friend could have! Making sure to make the most of every day is what we plan on doing in 2W... right through, until the last day! Sleep well... it will make you smart!

Poetry and Calendars!!

What a great Tuesday! Warm, sunny and full of learning in 2W! We started with work board and a reading celebration showcasing nonfiction writing with David and Georgia and their research on bees! Well done! It's May, and calendar math was today's work in math! Making May calendars, marking important dates, and using our calendars to solve problems kept us very busy! Brainpop Jr. helped us review important reasons why learning about calendars is important work! Everyone answered questions in both the easy and the hard quiz! Well done everyone!! It's April... Poetry month! And today, we introduced poetry in writing workshop. We read a beautiful Leo Lionni story called Fredrick, and dabbled in some poetry of our own! Everyone loved being a poet today... breaking rules of conventional writing... and most important, writing from the heart! More writing and experimenting with different kinds of poetry! Can't wait! We also had some important meetings today with our meeting helpers, David and Justin! Great morning meetind David! The clothespin game went exactly as planned... very challenging! And yet another great math meeting Justin! Today's date in money was truly inspiring! Well done!

Geometry, Compound Words and V.I.P. Marcus!

Another beautiful day tops off a stellar week of warm sunny spring weather, and our geometry unit! We started the first of our 2 week unit on geometry and learned all about shapes, 2D and 3D and their attributes! We were introduced to many new important words like quadrilateral, angle, vertices, cube and face... just to name a few! We will continue our geometry unit next week as well, while maintaining skills practice in computation, and skip counting! Lots of meetings took place this week too! Many morning meetings as well as math meetings with Bianca, this week's math meeting helper! She lead us in calendar jobs, money counting,and weather graphing! Well done Bianca, and all our meeting helpers this week! Marcus was our V.I.P. this week and we learned all about his travels and family in Sweden and trips to Mexico! Swimming in a lagoon full of fish sure sounds adventurous! Well done Marcus! 2W also learned more about compound words this week in word study. In writing workshop we finally finished our unit on All About Books... nonfiction writing, and will be ready to share soon! What a variety of topics we have too... very interesting! We were also surprised by a little visit by Miss Nelms! Just in time to read another chapter in read aloud! Thanks Miss Nelms! Wonderful week in 2W friends! Enjoy this beautiful weekend!

Field Trip!

What a beautiful day for a field trip! So off to UMass Fine Arts Center went Sunderland K, First, and Second grades! After thoroughly enjoying the story of the 3 little pigs... as told by Alexander T. Wolf (AKA Big Bad Wolf) we were off to the FAC to see the play! The set was fanciful, the performances were full of music and dancing, and we were fully involved in the story as it unfolded! We even got to be "jurors" and got to decide on the guilt or innocence of the Wolf! What fun! This afternoon after talking about the characters, each of their points of view, and whether they persuaded us to believe in "their" side of the story, it was time for writing workshop. Today we wrote thank you letters to our P.T.O. for generously supporting this field trip by covering the cost of every student's ticket! WOW! What a great day! Thanks again, P.T.O. for providing such enrichment to our literacy program in second grade! We loved it!!