Up, Up, and Away

I think it is safe to say we are in "full swing" and we have been busy!

To get prepared for our Park City Museum field trip on October 22nd (permission slips went home Friday), we have been learning about the history of Park City and, more specifically, the mining history.

We talked about where miners traveled from to come to Park City.

We have also looked at a diagram of a mine and discussed some of the mining vocabulary (mucker, driller, powder monkey, doghouse, cage, hoistman, etc...)  Pictures to come...

All of our Park City history work will be kept in our suitcases.

One of our comprehension skills was cause and effect.  The kids did pretty well with the difficult skill.  After reading Diary of a Spider, we made cause and effect puzzles.

To practice a bit more, we read Pete the Cat.  This is a great example of cause and effect relationships.

By the end of 2nd grade, it is expected that 2nd grade students will be able to write a topic sentence, detail, explanation, and conclusion.  We use a color-coded system from Step-Up-To-Writing for this.  Our first lesson was to talk about what the colors mean.  Green = topic sentence; Yellow = detail; 

Red = Explanation/Example/Evidence; Green = Conclusion 

Here is an example: 

My family and I love to go to the zoo.  We like to watch the monkeys.  It is so fun to watch them swing from tree to tree.  The zoo is a fun place to go with my family.  

We played a couple of organization games...

Why do I have a picture of someone's hands, you ask?  One of our recent writing projects was to write about "the best part of me."  I was so thrilled with their writing for this project.  

Last Friday, we were lucky to have one of the hot air balloons from the Autumn Aloft at our school.  

Just one of the many other balloons in the sky at the same time...

We had our first art lesson last week.  Ms. debVinci (really, her name is Ms. Deb Kulig).  She talked about lines and shapes.  You can see our artwork hanging in the hallways!

We're Off to a Superhero Start!

We still work on routines and procedures daily, but we have also jumped right into our academics.  Here is a little sneak peak at what has been happening with our "superheroes in training:"

While I am working with small reading groups, the rest of the students will be working on Daily 5.  So far, I have introduced Read to Self, Read to Someone, and a few Word Work activities.  

one of our word work activities: using wiki stix to spell high frequency and spelling words

Our spelling words are based on spelling patterns.  I introduce the spelling pattern on Monday and then the students cut, sort, and write their spelling words. 

Last week, our comprehension skill was comparing and contrasting.  We used a venn diagram to compare and contrast what we like to do with our families to what Camila liked to do with her family (from our Journeys story, My Family).

Not sure why this photo would not cooperate with me...

Our writing focus was writing a friendly letter.  After making our venn diagrams, the students wrote letters to their moms and dads about their favorite family activity.  These will be coming home in about a week.  

 

 

We've had a couple of students with birthdays these past few weeks.  They absolutely love wearing the superhero cape.

This week we are talking about author's purpose, writing more descriptive sentences, statements and questions, and words with long vowels sounds a and i.