Our Classroom Learning in Photos

Thank you for visiting our class blog!  Here you will see what your child is doing/learning on the English side of his/her 2nd grade experience.

We use Words Their Way for our word study (spelling and phonics).  On Mondays, we go through our patterns in small group, highlight the headers, and write the words on the homework contract (which goes home every Monday).

Tuesday:  cut/sort/write in our word study folders

Wednesday:  speed sort and draw & label

Thursday:  word hunt (finding words with the same pattern while students read independently)

Here is a quick peek at one of our Wixie projects.  After reading the story Animals Building Homes, students wrote complete sentences about animals' homes and drew pictures to go along with their sentences.

Our theme for this first (about) 6 weeks is houses and homes.  We have been talking about certain vocabulary words that go along with that theme:  region, village, house, home, community, and neighborhood (so far).  Students worked together to add these words to our vocabulary wall.

They also worked, in their table groups, to make signs so we could name our table groups after those vocabulary words.

The children have been learning about Charley Harper in art.  They have art 2x/month.

Here is a quick peek at their project...more to come!

We also used Wixie to make vocabulary cards.  Students can use these to play a matching game with a friend during Daily 5 time.

Action shots during Daily 5:

Read to Self

Word Work (using their differentiated high frequency chart)

Word Work

Word Work (spelling their high frequency words using Wikki Stix)

One of the classes started using iPads this past Friday.  We used Educreations to do a word hunt/sort with their spelling patters for the week.

I'll be back soon with more photos of our learning!

Welcome!

Welcome to the 2015-2016 school year!  I can't wait to get to know you and your child this year.

The first day of school for students is Thursday, August 20th.  I hope you are able to join us at Back to School Night on Tuesday, August 18th, from 5-6:30 p.m.  This would be a great time for me to meet you and your child, as well as getting them acquainted with their classrooms.

Like last year, half of your child's day will be in English and half in Spanish.  Maestro Martin will be teaching language arts and math in Spanish.  I will be teaching language arts and doing math reinforcement in English.

About Me:

This will be my 8th year teaching 2nd grade at McPolin.  Before moving to Park City, I taught Special Education for 7 years in Anchorage, Alaska.  My husband, Andy, teaches 5th grade at McPolin.  We have 2 children.  Emma (5) will be in kindergarten at McPolin and Abigail (2) will attend the Park City School District Child Care Center.  When I am not in school, I enjoy running, hiking, camping, reading, and just hanging out with my family.   

  

Enjoy your last few days of summer and I will see you very soon!

Iditarod!

We had a such a fun time studying the Iditarod last week.  We even have students "mushing" at recess!  I love it!  Here are just some photos of our studies:

We kept all of our work in our Iditarod folders.

There are so many vocabulary words that come along with understanding the Iditaord.  Each student had their own Iditarod dictionary.  

This project was great practice at answering "WH" questions and writing in complete sentences.

Last Friday, we had some guests visit our school--Luna Lobos Dog Sledding.  Fernando (owner) brought 9 of his 29 sled dogs.  It was such a learning experience for the students to actually see what we had learned that week.  

Classroom Update

We have been busy bees.  Our school is working on academic language that is most frequently seen on tests, such as SAGE.  It is our hope that, even starting in kindergarten, working on these words (and their meanings) in our classrooms will help our students increase their test scores.  Our 2 most recent words have been comprehend and alliteration.  We will be writing alliterations this week, and comprehend is something we work on, daily.  Here is one activity we did that helps us comprehend what we are reading:

Students worked in pairs to comprehend the meaning of these nonsense words by using the context clues.

Both classes have finished our most recent writing project.  If you could have any animal hair, what would it be?  Why?  For this writing activity, we were working on having a topic sentence, reason/detail, explanation, and conclusion sentence.  They turned out super cute!

Hopefully, you all saw your child's homework contract come home on Friday.  This usually does not come home until Monday but, with our Be a Team Player Read-a-Thon starting this past Friday, reading minutes will go from Friday-Thursday.  Homework will still be due on Fridays.  The goal is for each child to read, at least, 20 minutes per day (before or after school).  If McPolin is one of the top 10 schools (out of the 40 schools participating) with the highest number of reading minutes, a Utah Jazz player will visit our school!