Hour of Code

Our 2nd graders had the awesome opportunity to experience computer science this past week.  They were able to experience coding on an app called Kodable, which can be downloaded for free.  The kids loved it!

A "Wheely" Good Show!

We had the awesome opportunity to watch "All Wheel Sports" at the Eccles Center yesterday.  They have been on American's Got Talent and include professional athletes.  A couple are even X-Games gold medalists.  Everybody was having a great time, until the fire alarm went off at the high school....

Verbs and Procedural Writing

We have been working on verbs, verbs, and more verbs.  To practice writing past, present, and future verbs, we made an "All About ____" book.

We have also been working on procedural writing ("How To...").  We talked about the steps for how to create an aspen tree scene.  Then, students had to follow the steps they came up with to complete the art.  

A lot of students still need to finish, but here are some that are already complete:

This next week, and the short week before Thanksgiving break, we will be working on narrative/story writing.  We will also be doing a little more work with facts and opinions.  

Main Idea/Details, Verbs, and Halloween

Phew!  What a week!

We started talking about verbs by making our own anchor chart.

We also put sentences together and circled the nouns in those sentences.

Our story in Journeys was called Super Storms.  It was a very engaging story and it definitely kept the kids' attention.  They just LOVE non-fiction.  Our comprehension skill was main ideas/details.  We put these in our notebooks.

By the end of 2nd grade, the students should be able to write a topic sentence, detail, explanation, and concluding sentence.  They have a difficult time differentiating between the details and the explanations.  This is something we will continue to work on weekly.

Here are some photos of our Halloween festivities on Thursday:

Proper Nouns, Summarizing, and Pumpkins

Last week, we were busy learning about proper nouns and summarizing.  We have worked on nouns for a couple of weeks but when you throw proper nouns into the mix, it can get a little confusing.

The students made an anchor chart for proper nouns.

As a review, we did a sort of common and proper nouns in our notebooks.

We also worked on summarizing.  Last week, we read The Ugly Vegetables so we wrote a summary for the story.  This can be a tricky concept because, sometimes, students want to tell every detail about the story.

The library held a pumpkin decorating contest.  Pumpkins could not be carved and has to resemble a children's book or character from a children's book.  2nd grade did The Magic School Bus Goes Batty.

Some 2nd grade students decorated their own pumpkins, too.  What a great job! 

This week we will be talking about main idea/details, visualizing, and verbs.  

Communities

With the short week last week, we did not work from our Journeys curriculum.  Instead, we focused on social studies and talked about communities: rural/urban/suburban and community helpers.

After watching a BrainPop Jr. video, we made a chart and wrote down things we would find in urban, suburban, and rural communities.

Then we made a diagram from our information.  We talked about how Park City would be a suburban community and Salt Lake City would be an urban community.

 As a review at the end of the week we made a venn diagram, comparing and contrasting urban and rural communities.

We also talked about community helpers.  After reading our story, Community Helpers, the students wrote about the community helper s/he thought was most important and why.