Happenings in 2nd Grade

I am in LOVE with my second grade class. They are an amazing group of kids. They are so well behaved, have nice manners, are very friendly, are considerate, and participate in everything with a smile on their face. I have had to give our reminders about too much talking or remembering to raise hands. They are a dream class and I feel so lucky to be their teacher!

We are working on getting the Daily 5 up and running. I am seeing overseeing all their rotations and haven’t started working on guided reading groups with them yet. I just finished getting everyone’s independent and instructional reading levels using DRA. 

During Daily 5 writing on Friday my kids wrote to police officers, fire fighters, and soldiers to thank them for their service. Their letters were adorable! Most of my students had a family member or neighbor they could give their letters to. The ones that didn't I took and will be sending out. I got the writing paper free from Erica Bohrer.

We have library time every other Thursday. The students listen to a story from our librarian and then get to check out 2 books. I stay with them the whole time to help them check out books. When my students are checking out books, I ask them to get AR (accelerated reading) books on their level. They are colored coded in the library so it is easier to choose books.

Do you ever have students that just take forever to pick out a book? Some choose so quickly or have an idea of what they are looking for in a book. Some just have no idea what they want though. Library check out rant over.

We have been doing so much science in second grade! We started learning about the science tools and the basics of the scientific method. So far we have done two experiments. My little scientists are loving observing.

The first experiment was making raisins dance. First I poured Sprite into a clear cup for each table. Then each student got to put a raisin in the cup. The raisins then dance up and down in the cup. My students loved doing this experiment! They realized the bubbles from the Sprite made the raisins dance up and down. I got this recording sheet for our science notebook from What the Teacher Wants.

The second experiment was to see what happened when we put Mentos into different sodas. Most of my students already knew that if you put Mentos into soda it bubbled up or exploded. So we did a test to see which one had the biggest explosion and lost the most soda. This is my teammate putting the Mentos into the different sodas. We used orange soda, Sprite, Root Beer, regular Coke, and Diet Coke. If you are wondering which one made the biggest explosion….it was Diet Coke! I was surprised! Root Beer was the next and then Coke. The Sprite and orange soda barely bubbled over. Warning this experiment has to be done outside! It is messy!

My teammate going out in the rain to do our experiment! The rain can't stop our science plans!

This coming week is going to be a super busy one! We have meetings every day during our planning time and Open House on Tuesday night. Thankfully, I’m blessed with a wonderful class and second grade team!

Loving my classroom!

Hope the beginning of your school year is going well!