Plugged In

This week I participate in screen free week.  No computer, TV, etc for a week.  Well the school day part of the week.  Look what happened-

 First we invited our school to go screen free with us-

 and made sure we stayed screen free in our classroom-
Math on Whiteboards-

The weather was so nice we did our weekly problem solving outside...no idea why my camera thought to do a black and white photo-  Each group did one portion of the problem solving steps, then shared about it.

And vocabulary...no powerpoint slideshow.  We acted them out.  Here are fetch, construction, assembled, and downtown-

Only 25 more days....yes I am counting!
Happy Saturday,

Some Graphing and Some Birds and a Challenge

This week begins our Bird Study.  We started our Bird Lap Books.  Chickadees had to come up with a title for the lap book and some illustrations.  I have never made a lap book before, but have a friend who uses them with her home school kiddos.  So I am attempting to apply it to the class room setting.  So far, I am happy with the work we have done, and at the end of the unit, it will be a portfolio of finished work for students to have...everything will already be put together....which saves me (or a parent volunteer) a lot of busy work.

definition and sketch of bird words

After we had our cover done we added a pocket for collecting bird vocabulary.  Tip:  If you don't have pockets, you can make your own.  I grabbed a small envelope, sealed it, and cut it in half horizontally.  Then we glued it into a side of our lap book and can add vocabulary words, written on 3x5 cards.  Today's words...ornithologist and aves.

pocket for bird word collection

We also began a math "elective" rotation.  Students chose between graphing, money, or measurement and go to the teacher who is teaching that math "elective".  Next week, students will switch and go to the next of the electives they haven't done.  We teachers teach the same thing each time.  I love it when us teachers work together.  I can focus on one topic and teach it well, as well as getting to know some of the other 2nd graders I don't know as well.  My room is the graphing room.  We started by making a quick little self portrait, for graphing information about ourselves.  

Then we used our portraits to collect and graph data about our group.  We added numbers to the left side of our graph, after we lined up our faces, but I forgot to take a picture.

Favorite Sport

Favorite Restaurants

Adding our portrait to the graphing data.

After making our graph in the middle of the room, on the floor, we transferred our information to our own paper.  We learned that graphs have a title, and labels for the horizontal and vertical lines.

Have you heard of the  5 Star Blogger?  Charity over at The Organized Classroom Blog has put out a challenge for the blogging community.  Come on over and check it out.







Happy Tuesday,
 

Word Wall Update

I have always wanted to do a word wall, but was horrible about adding to it.  This year, I got the word wall up, and decided to put up the vocabulary words from each of the Treasures units.  During the week, the words are on our target wall.  At the end of the week, students choose a word and draw an illustration of the word, then add we add it to the word wall.