Holiday Traditions

During the month of December Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars learned about different holiday traditions. After sharing lots of our favorite holiday traditions the students created their own google slide showing their own family holiday traditions. They also wrote a personal narrative describing their favorite holiday tradition. They brought this piece of writing home on Friday in their homework folders. There are two versions of the slide show for you to view. One is a google slides presentation and one is in a video format. Our final activity was recording a holiday message to share with you. We hope you enjoy these holiday presentations.





                                                           Merry Christmas!

Geography

Today we were very fortunate to have an excellent in school field trip. Second-grade students participated in a geography game show presented by Neal Nichols. Mr. Nichols combines his artistic talent with his geographical knowledge to teach students about geography around the world. After a whole grade interactive presentation, Mr. Nichols visited the second-grade classes individually to teach them even more about geography and drawing. Our very own Christina won the Geography Game Show by being a good listener and paying very close attention to all the facts that Mr. Nichols shared with us. He asked some very challenging geography questions about our world. Click on this  link to go the Geography Game Show website to learn more about this program. Thank you to our awesome PTO for funding this great in school field trip.

                    

Jacoby GHO

Today we were lucky enough to be able to have a Google Hangout with our classmate Jacoby. He is visiting his family in Ecuador for the holidays. Jacoby shared what he has been doing this week with his family. He went to a place near the equator where he could put one foot in the northern hemisphere and one foot in the southern hemisphere. He also told us it is 70 degrees and windy today in Ecuador. We were so excited to tell him that it was snowing in Middleton today. While we were talking with Jacoby Neil the geography man was visiting our classroom and he drew a picture live on GHO of South America for Jacoby. Even Dr. Carreiro came down to say hi. This was definitely meaningful global learning at its best.

Mystery Google Hangout

Last week Mrs. Kennedy's Super Stars participated in their first Mystery Location Google Hangout. Each class wrote a riddle giving clues about our locations. The classroom we connected with was an American school in Germany. The tricky part was that they are six hours ahead of us and as we were starting our school day at 8:30 they were getting ready to go home. This global learning activity sparked lots of discussions and questions about geography as well as differences and similarities among people living in different parts of the world.

Click on the link below to see what our friends in Germany shared with us.
Holiday Global Learning Questions Mrs. Langston’s Second Grade Kaiserslautern, Germany

Tree Decorating

One of Mrs. Kennedy's classroom traditions is to decorate an evergreen tree each year outside with edible ornaments for the animals. This tradition was inspired many years ago from the story Night Tree by Eve Bunting. The students in 2K were so excited to carry on this tradition this year. Thank you for making sure that your child had an ornament to hang on the tree. I'm sure the creatures that live outside will be happy to find some treats during the cold winter months. The students also used their predicting skills while we were reading this story. Many children had to adjust their predictions as we were reading and thinking about this realistic fiction story. Click on the picture to listen to this story.

 

Yoga

This week Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars had their first yoga session with Mrs. Marshall.  Yoga is a wonderful way to calm our bodies and minds and who couldn't use that this time of year? Mrs. Marshall taught us some positions such as hero, tree, cat and cow, and waterfall. Our favorite pose is to lie quietly and do nothing at the end of the session. 

Global Holiday Card Exchange

Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars are participating in a holiday global card exchange. The theme for the holiday card this year  is gingerbread. Each student created a gingerbread person using specific directions on the glyph. We then made a Chatter Pix video recording  special holiday messages. Our movie will be sent to the participating classes throughout the country as well as classes in Canada and Austraila. It has been very exciting to begin receiving holiday cards electronically from lots of different schools from around the country.

Random Acts of Kindness

Today for our random act of kindness we wrote notes to Mr. Sam. Hopefully, you are seeing some random acts of kindness at home too!

Family Holiday Traditions

During December we will be talking about different holiday family traditions. Our discussions will be a springboard for  a personal narrative writing piece telling about our different traditions. Please share a family holiday tradition on the padlet below. Feel free to add  a picture!

Thanksgiving Fun

During the past couple of weeks Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars have been learning about the Pilgrims and the First Thanksgiving. We performed a reader's theater, The First Thanksgiving for our Kindergarten and First Grade buddy classes. The students then showed off their expertise by answering questions about the pilgrims. Our performance was most impressive as you will see in the video. Happy Thanksgiving to all!


 Students each created their own slide in google slides showing what they are thankful for. It's great to see the creativity in this slide show.

Here is a fun video showing off all of our uniquely designed turkeys. We have had lots of compliments on our turkeys that are displayed on our bulletin board. Thank you for your support at home with this project.

Cranberry Tasting

This morning the Fuller Meadow Second Graders brought back the Fuller Meadow annual tradition of cranberry tasting. This tradition was started by our newly retired first grade teacher, Mrs. Fuller.  The tasting stations consisted of cranberry sauce/jelly, raw cranberries, Craisens, and cranberry bread, and cranberry juices. Each student had a special of job of  being the greeter, food server, tally keeper, or graph recorder. The results are posted below. Thank you to the volunteers that came in to supervise the stations. 

Veterans Day

This week during Social Studies Mrs. Kennedy's Super Stars learned about the importance of Veteran's Day. We viewed a couple of videos about the history of this day and why we honor our veterans with a holiday. We did a reader's theater in small groups and wrote letters to the veterans. The letters will be mailed to the Veterans' Center at North Shore Community College. We ended our day on Thursday with a school wide assembly to honor all of our country's  veterans . 

Thank you Veterans

What are you thankful for?

During November Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars will be making a thankful chain. Each day a thankful link will be added to each student's individual chain. Each day at morning meeting we are sharing what we are thankful for.  We would like other family members to add to the  padlet below and share what they are thankful for. Please remember you can share our blog with grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins etc. We look forward to reading your responses. Just double click on the padlet to type your response. 

Halloween Fun

Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars had lots of fun celebrating Halloween in school today. We had our annual Halloween parade this morning. After parading outside for all the spectators we paraded inside for all the grades. It is always so much fun to see all the different costumes. After lunch we had a fabulous Halloween party. The children decorated pumpkins, made a ghost, played pin the nose on the Jack-o-Lantern, and Halloween Bingo. Thank you very much to our parent volunteers who helped organize such a fun party. Thank you also for your donations for the crafts and prizes.

Math Fun

Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars have been working on some challenging new math concepts. One of the most important second grade common math standards is to be able to add and subtract within 1000, using concrete models or drawings and strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction; relate the strategy to a written method. Understand that in adding or subtracting three-digit numbers, one adds or subtracts hundreds and hundreds, tens and tens, ones and ones; and sometimes it is necessary to compose or decompose tens or hundreds.This can be a challenging standard but the students in 2K are up for taking on the challenge and are learning that it's ok to make mistakes and sometimes we have to stick with a problem in order to exercise and grow our brains. 

We started by using base ten pieces to build concrete models of the numbers and learned the concept of regrouping by manipulating the base ten pieces.
Next ,we learned how to write the numbers by lining up the digits in the correct place value  columns and writing the algorithms correctly on our whiteboards.  We practiced this concept by playing a game with the digit cards. The object of the game was to try and get the greatest sum when adding two three digit numbers together. There was some good strategizing taking place.

Then we rotated around four math stations to practice our math skills some more. We are very lucky to have Mrs. Reid work with us in our room once a week during math time. You can see how hard everyone is working and how focused they are on their tasks.

Another fun and engaging math activity that we are participating in during WIN time is a Global Twitter Math Challenge. Each week a different class takes a turn posting math challenges on Twitter for other classes to solve. After we solve the challenge we tweet our answer back to the class. Our turn to post questions will be coming up soon. This is an optional activity but it is so exciting to hear so many students asking to solve the math challenge everyday. You can  find the challenge by searching Twitter for #gmttc2 .

This week we joined our Kindergarten friends in Mrs. Newton's class for a live streaming event presented by Go Noodle. The characters at Go Noodle taught us how to play the mystery geography skype game. We had to guess a mystery location somewhere in the world by asking yes and no questions. Of course there was some singing and dancing involved  so we could get in a motor/brain break. Be sure to ask your child where the mystery skype location was. Hint-It has something to do with a frankfurter (hot dog). We are looking forward to connecting with another class soon to do another mystery skype. This is a great way to learn geography.

October is Anti-Bullying month. We discussed our school bullying rules and then made a paper bracelet stating an important idea about anti-bullying.

Fall Tree

Last week Mrs.Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars observed our fall tree. This project is the first part of  a  a science unit on the Seasonal Life Cycle of the tree. The students took pictures with the ipads to record their observations. They also used magnifying glasses to observe the parts of the tree closely. As the seasons change we will add an observation of the tree and record our observations for each season. It was a beautiful fall afternoon to be a scientist at Fuller Meadow.

Global Read Aloud

This week Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars started our  Global Read Aloud project . We are reading The BFG by Roald Dahl along with hundreds of thousands of other children from around the world. Today we participated in a Google Hangout with another second grade class from Denver, CO. We took turns asking questions about the first two chapters. The second graders shared some great ideas together about what we have read so far. We have also shared our thinking on padlets to share with other classes. It is so exciting to share our learning globally with classes outside of our school. We can't wait to see what happens to Sophie in the next chapter. 

Our Predictions

Video Clips of our questions that we asked Mrs. Hansen's class during our Google Hangout.

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Sharing our questions with our new friends in Denver, CO.

                             

Johnny The K

On Friday we had one of our favorite visitors come back to Fuller Meadow School, Johnny the K. The whole school, both students and staff were entertained by Johnny's songs about character, confidence, respect, caring, and kindness. This is a day we always look forward to every year. It is wonderful to see the children smiling and laughing and having fun while participating in Johnny the K's program. Thank you to our PTO for bringing this program back to our school every year. It's a great way to kick off the new school year.

International Dot Day

Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars participated in International Dot Day this week. We learned about how Dot Day started and the important message in Peter Reynold's story, The Dot by watching a live streaming event that took place in Iowa. The original Dot Day was started by a music teacher in a school in Iowa. The students made their mark and showed their creativity by designing their own dot in Art. Then they wrote a poem about their dot which we made into a chattpix video. Click this link to watch a short video about The Dot. https://youtu.be/XDqSZXV13dQ

2K Dot Day Video

Our creative dots made in Art class

Peter Reynold's discussing Dot Day live in Iowa.

Sharing ideas for our successful classroom this year.

We earned 500 Class Dojo points for positive classroom behavior. Our reward was extra playground time.

September Second Grade Super Stars

Mrs. Kennedy's Second Grade Super Stars are off to a great start. We have been busy learning our new class routines and getting to know one another.  Here is quick glimpse of what has been happening in our classroom during the past two weeks.

First Day of Second Grade Video

                         

How I Spent My Summer Vacation Google Map

Sharing our Me Boxes

Practicing Read to Self in our flexible seating spots

Writing in our Writer's Notebooks

Classroom Scavenger Hunt