Look What’s Happening in Room 102!

Grade 2 had a lot of fun learning about owls. Each student chose an owl and did some research at home to find out what their animal ate, where it lived, what it looked like and some interesting facts. For a project each student designed a pamphlet to display their ow. Students also used Tux Paint and Pixie which are drawing programs to make owls. Watch our slideshow to see some of our owls.

What We Learned About Owls on PhotoPeach

I’d like to introduce the newest member to our classroom. His name is Jake and he is a chocolate lab. We will take turns taking him home and playing with him. He will come home in a bag with a “Martha Speaks” story and an information book about dogs. Who knows maybe he is a dog like Martha and will speak to you at your house. Also included in the bag is a tangram game that you can play with Jake. Finally, there is a journal for you to write about what you did with Jake. I know Jake can’t wait to come to your house.

Where the Wild Things movie has been out for a few weeks now. Many of us saw the movie and give it a “thumbs up” review. We were busy in class last term with making our own wild things and describing them. I found this site that I would like to share with you. You can “Build Your Wild Self” at home on this site.
If you look to the right under “links” you can also find the site by clicking on “Build Your Wild Self”. Have fun!

Do you watch PBS Kids? This is a public television channel that has lots of great shows for kids. It is a great channel for all my students to tune into to help them with their English. One new addition to their programming is Martha Speaks. I fell in love with Susan Meddaugh stories a few years ago and have a collection. Martha is a talking dog and has many adventures with her ability to speak. Check out the Martha Speaks site on the internet. There are videos and games to play.

I added “Martha” to our list of links on the right.

We had a fun “Halloween” day at school on Friday. Everyone was dressed in very creative costumes. Here is a picture of the delicious cake sent in by Hunter’s family and of everyone in their costume. The cake was delicious.

Our class has been reading Folk Tales. One of our first ones was Little Red Hen. We learned about storyboard and made one together. We used it a few times to retell Little Red Hen. We also made our own picture story maps. Check out our work and our voicethread. We made our own version of Little Red Hen.

If you like our voicethread please leave us a comment.

Practicing your math facts can be fun if you use some online games. Try this site Arcademic Skill Builders to practice your facts. It’s like an arcade game.

We have been reading Maurice Sendak’s classic story “Where the Wild Things Are” in class. We have enough books so that each student can have a copy in front to them. On Wednesday afternoons our 4th grade Reading Buddies come to our class. Last week we read the story together and then wrote down important words from the story. I collected all these words and typed them on a word document. Then I copied and pasted these words on a wordle .
The picture above shows what we created. Try making your own wordle. Laura says she has tried making one at home.
Come back to our blog later to see our “Wild Things”. We each made a wild thing. We are all excited to go see the movie. It starts today. I think I will have to wait until next weekend to see it. I can’t wait.

La Ferme Deschenes from Mary Ellen Lynch on Vimeo.

Watch our movie and listen to the children explain what we saw and did on the farm. Thanks to Sonia for teaching us about the farm animals. A special thank you goes to the parents who came with us and braved the cold weather.

Today we counted the seeds from the small pumpkin – while our pumpkin soup was cooking in the crock pot. Yum! Well, first we made some estimates. We knew there were less seeds in the small pumpkin than the medium and large pumpkin by looking at the bags. Some estimates we came up with were 100, 150, 200, 300, 302 and 308. We had counted by 10s and 5s yesterday so today we counted by 2s. I gave each child a small handful of seeds and they put them on their desk in a line of 10 seeds counting by 2s. Then we added up all our groups and I made the seeds on the board. We counted 230 seeds. Next, on a piece of paper we made the number of seeds that the medium pumpkin had -480 seeds. We needed to count by 2s, 5s or 10s. When counting it is important to be organized so it is easy to count. We are really trying to be accurate. See below some pictures of our work in progress.