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Friday, September 25, 2015

Take a Second to Peek into 2ND Grade - Blogger of the Week!

Check out our featured 2nd Grade Teacher Blogger of the Week!

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Hey friends!  Today I'm really excited to be joining Katie from Pop Into Primary for her Take a Second to Peek into 2nd blog series.  Each week there will be a new featured blogger that you won't want to miss.  Each blogger will be sharing a little about themselves and will also be putting one of their products on sale for two days.

I'm super excited because the first featured blogger is .... Stephanie from The Learning Chambers!  Let's learn a little more about Stephanie and her featured product that is on sale in her TPT store!

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I've also picked one of my favorite products and it will be on sale August 25th and 26th only.  My reading response flap journals are so much fun and a great way to have your students respond to the books that they are reading independently.  It's one of my students' favorite reading activities.


They are also differentiated because your students can use whatever book they are reading at the time.  They also include two different styles of writing lines.  You can click on the cover image to check them out in my store.


Thanks so much for reading all about me!




Tuesday, September 22, 2015

It's Punkin' Day - or will be! Pumpkin Fun

Hey friends - I'm so ready for our 2-week track-out that starts this Friday, but I'm already looking forward to the end of October when we will have our first Pumpkin Day!


We are actually going to have Pumpkin Week - all leading up to our exploration of pumpkins through hands-on activities on Thursday of that week.

Monday through Wednesday we will incorporate pumpkins into our language arts block through reading both fiction and non-fiction texts, and using graphic organizers to practice summarizing, finding the main idea, author's purpose, and more!  There are also adjectives activities, writing prompts, and themed writing papers.  I know we won't even begin to get to all of this!


Anchor Charts?  I've got your covered!  I've included clipart and directions on printing to size about how to make anchor charts like these!





Pumpkin activities and crafts will be a big part of our Pumpkin Day!
Pumpkin Diagram (labeling)
Life Cycle of a Pumpkin Craftivity
Pumpkin Facts Headband (not pictured below)
Roll-a-Pumpkin (not pictured below)
Pumpkin Tissue Paper outline and directions
Pumpkin Craft and Writing Paper


But pumpkins are not all about language arts, life cycles, and crafts - we've got to do some math with our pumpkins too!  There are several graphing activities and even activities to go with a pumpkin taste-test!  My kids are really excited about this - they were begging for pumpkin pie - something I didn't think they would want, but it'll be added to our parent-request list! 

How do I ask parents for items - I use Sign-Up Genius for all sorts of parent requests - sending in items, volunteering from home, etc.  It's a great online resource that allows parents to easily sign up for items or things they would like to do associated with your classroom.  Here is a sample of what our Sign-Up Genius for Pumpkin Day looks like:


The week prior to Pumpkin Day, we are going to "plant" pumpkin seeds in ziplock bags, hang them in our window (since we get a lot of sun) and wait for them to sprout!  I've never done this, so I hope it works out well.  Once their seed sprouts, they get to take it home and can plant it so they can grow their own pumpkin (in the far distant future - like next summer!).


On the afternoon of our Pumpkin Day, we are going to get elbow deep into our Pumpkin Investigation with this booklet.  We are going to do all sorts of math and science activities in small groups with our pumpkins.  Measuring our pumpkin, weighing it and comparing the weights of our pumpkins, doing a sink or float investigation, counting the seeds, and making pumpkin volcanoes!  It's going to be a ton of fun!


Be sure to check it out in my TPT store!



Monday, September 7, 2015

Math Tip Monday September: Number Sense {Even & Odd}

Hello Friends!

This morning I'm linking up with K's Classroom Kreations & Theresa's Teaching Tidbits for Math Tip Monday.  This month, it is all about number sense and I'm excited to share with you a project we did last week to practice even and odd numbers!


Last week we moved from repeated addition and arrays into even and odd numbers.  We have been doing skip counting since the beginning of school thanks to All Thing's Apple in 2nd's super awesome skip counting to a tune songs.  My kids LOVE them.  So far, we've learned up through the 6's.
Anyways - having my kids be able to easily skip count by 2's made the lesson go a little easier, because we knew, if the number came up in our song (only goes through 30) it would be an even number.  Besides just learning that fact - we also drew a lot of pictures and made sure that each dot/square/shape had a partner.

When teaching even and odd, I like to tell my kids its like the shapes or pictures are doing the dosey doe and everyone has to have a partner to do the dosey doe.  When someone is left out, they are "the odd man out".  So, when we are working on our classwork in small group, we practice this circling the partners and I love hearing my kids say, "Oh, there's an odd man out - this number is odd!"

After two days of learning about odd and even - we were ready for a little project!  My kids worked with a partner and I assigned them a series of numbers {0-9, 10-19, 20-29, etc through 99 since I had 10 groups that day}.  They worked with their partner to create an Odd and Even Street with their numbers.  Their numbers became the house numbers.  I originally found this idea from The Teacher Wife, but wanted to do it on a little bit of a smaller scale, so it was a quick print and run to the copier before the kids walk in that morning since I came up with this idea at the last minute!


We talked about how when things are even, they are the same - so all of the houses on Even Street needed to look the same.  But, when things are "odd" they are a little quirky and strange - so all of the houses on Odd Street are very colorful and different looking - some even sitting sideways!  The kids followed my example pretty well, so we made a super long (too long for my wall space) Even and Odd Street outside of our classroom with numbers 1-99!



All of the even numbers went on top, and odd on the bottom.  Students also had to put their house numbers in order, just like we would find house numbers on our streets that we live on.  This way, our Even and Odd Streets look more realistic.


Students wrote their house numbers on the roof and then colored their houses.  We watched this video on the first day of learning about even and odd - so when I made my example for the kids, I made some bushes with even and odd numbers, like in the video. You'll see above, some of my kiddos really followed my example and even did the same thing with numbered bushes!


Want to do this activity with your kiddos?
Click here to download the blank house templates.
Then use large construction paper so that students can create their streets.

Now, hop on around for some other math tips for teaching numbers sense!