Some bittersweet goodbyes!

Our days at school have been full of unique learning opportunities!

The children have been focused the last few weeks on a personalized learning project with their classmates. They began by writing down something they were wondering about relative to our life cycle unit. We then sorted the children's interests into small personalized learning groups for them to investigate these wonders further!

Using apps, websites, and kid-friendly search engines including: Pebble Go,  Brainpop Jr., Worldbook Online for Kids, a-z-animals.com, kidrex.org, and enchantedlearning.com, the children began researching the answers to their questions! They kept track of their learning on a note-taking fact organizer.

In reading, our Poetry unit has grabbed our full attention! Ryan went home and used the links on our web page to create a number of creative and clever poems all on his own! He was so happy to come in to share them with his classmates. It is so much fun to see the children's learning take off in this way!

 Our lessons in poetry had us closing our eyes to listen to the words and visualize the poem in our minds. The children listened to poems a few times to absorb all of the details, and drew a picture to represent what they imagined. It was such fun to see the similarities and differences in the children's drawings and perceptions.

 This was the picture on the page of the poetry book that matched the poem that the children listened to and illustrated. It was about a person playing "tug of war" on a windy day with a kite!

 This was Alexandra's last day of school with us! The children worked hard to create and sign this beautiful poster full of pictures of our time together this year. It was fun to surprise Alexandra with it on her last day. We are going to miss our dear friend, but we surely won't forget her!

 It was also time to say good bye to our dear butterfly friends! We loved watching them move through their fascinating life cycle and grow from egg to adult. It was sad to see them go, but maybe we'll see them fly by again one day! :)

 It seemed that a few butterflies weren't yet ready to say goodbye to US!

 Mrs. Phillips stopped in to celebrate National Nutrition Month with us! She gave us countless healthy facts and tips, and she provided suggestions of good foods to eat. Mrs. Phillips also talked to us about food groups, portion size, and calorie intake, and she mentioned that physical activity is an important part of our day, too! Mrs. Phillips also brought our attention to labels on food items, and had us look for the words "whole grains" and 100% to be sure we are getting food at its most natural state if possible. Our heads were swimming with great ideas!

 Mrs. Phillips brought all of the children a tasty clementine treat. What a perfect finish to a great presentation! Thank you for coming in, Mrs. Phillips!

 The children enjoyed a lively "dance party" to bring Alexandra's final day at Dryden to a close. Good luck to you and your family in Sweden! Keep in touch!

Flittering through a great week!

The children and I covered so much this week! 

Read on to see the highlights!

 The children headed straight for the butterfly house when they got to school on Monday morning, and were ecstatic to find our first butterflies flittering about!

 During math we delved more deeply into our fraction unit. The children learned about equivalent, or equal, fractions. The children labeled the fractional units on fraction circles and discovered which fractions were equal to others.

 The children observed the butterflies each morning and recorded their observations in their science notebooks. They noted the color, size, and activity of our new classmates!

 We started our brand new reading unit on Poetry. The children learned about the visual features of poetry including: white space, line length, use of capitalization, use of punctuation, and number of stanzas. The children went on to read poems on their own searching for these features, and then reported what they found back to the class.

Independent practice led the children to the use of actual books of poetry where they were happy to read poems of their choosing and further identified these important features.

 Another lesson in math provided the children the opportunity to identify fractions that are the equivalent to 1/2 , greater than 1/2 , and less than 1/2.  The shaded blue portions on their fraction cards helped the children to visualize the size of each fraction.

 We reached the end of our lowercase cursive practice this week! The children have done an outstanding job of practicing each letter carefully and smoothly, keeping their letters on the lines, and forming them correctly. I am so proud of their beautiful handwriting! They will take a mini cursive "quiz" before moving on to capital letters next week!

 For some fun practice at the end of the week, the children were very excited to practice their cursive letters in shaving cream on their desks. It encouraged them to remember how each letter is formed -without having a sample to trace first! An added bonus- it was an additional way for the children to review their spelling words before taking their test!

 We spent some time today reading and learning about current events in a Time for Kids magazine. Today's topic was the upcoming Presidential election. This TFK was perfect review of the election process that the children learned about back in November during our citizenship unit! We talked about how the Illinois primary is coming up next Tuesday, March 15 which will narrow down the number of candidates running for office.

 Another poetry lesson this week provided the children with the opportunity to not only note the poetry features we located earlier in the week, but also to use those features to add meaning to the poem and read it as it was intended by the poet who created it. We practiced reading poems aloud, pausing and commas and stopping to take a breath at the periods. We noticed that the semi colons and dashes also led us to pause, and we changed our voice at the end of lines, too!

 Meg was our super star second grader this week. Mrs. Peterson came in to help Meg share a fascinating experiment with us involving a marker, a coffee filter, and water. We watched as the water moved upward through the coffee filter, separating the black dot from Meg's marker into the other colors that created it! When the children returned from PE class, we looked at it again, and the colored dots that Meg scattered all over the filter had moved up to the top! What a cool experiment!

We are so very fortunate to have Meg in our class this year! She is a sweet, caring, hard working girl who cares so much about her learning and her classmates. Meg sets such a terrific example for her classmates with her eagerness to learn new things and the care and amazing effort she puts into her work. You had a fantastic week, Meg!