Cruise Control

School has been in session about a month now. It's already October, which seems CRAZY to me, but all the same, I will take it! I looove fall--as does everyone else. (I mean, have you seen the facebook statuses? The cyber world is a little fall crazed.)

While I love the crisp leaves, cool weather, beautiful trees, I also love getting back into school and all of the fantastic activities that come with fall including book character dress up day, field trips, and celebrating those delightful fall holidays!

Here in 2nd grade, we have been cruising along, pretty much since the 3rd day of school. My kids are all such eager learners and really love school! It allows me to just simply teach and flow right from one concept to another! One thing in particular they all love: reading. These kids devour books. It is phenomenal to teach a group of kids that are pumped to go to the library, love read aloud time, and want to read for homework!

To help encourage this love, I have created a bookworm in our classroom. The rules are simple: you need to read a substantial book that is mostly words. No picture books for this book worm. Every time you finish a book, let Miss Ongna know and I stick up a part of the worm's body with the book title on it. I started it at the beginning of last week. It is already halfway across one wall of my room. Love it! I think I may be in trouble with this idea, however, seeing as it is only October. We may have to extend in the hallway by the end of the year...

We've also been doing lots of fun activities in our other subjects. The students needed practice with the their, there, and they're words. Why not use shaving cream? I plopped some on their desks and I gave them a sentence, they have to write the one that was used. Needless to say, they enjoyed it :)

Getting into it!

Animals have been the focus of our studies in science, so we have done several activities including making tinfoil animals and dunking them in hot/cold water to understand cold blooded animals. We also created candy insects to go over the three parts of insects: head, thorax, and abdomen. We also talked about the exoskeletons, but it's hard to create that out of candy! And what better way to learn than to observe the real thing? One morning, one of my students hauled out that lovely snake in a bag out of their backpack. It was dead and totally in tact. Coolest thing ever!

The dead snake. Amazing!

Candy Insects

As you can see, 2nd grade is off to a great start as we head into our second month of school! I am so thankful for such a studious bunch who are SO excited to learn. Such a blessing :)