Our First Day!

Welcome to Second Grade! The children and I had a wonderful first day of school. We took a tour of the building, read a story, played "The Name Game," shared our summer vacations, and we also took an interactive survey using the white board and handheld student remotes! It was a fun way to help us to get to know each other! What an excellent start we had to a brand new school year!

Give the Gift of a Goat

Our school is participating in a reading incentive program this summer! After reading this book, Beatrice's Goat, we learned about an impoverished girl from Uganda and how her life was literally transformed by the gift of a goat. Heifer International is a non-profit world hunger organization that provides animals to families in need to provide them sustenance, and to give them a means of income. In this true story, Beatrice's family receives not only nourishment from the goat, but they are able to eventually build a new home with money they earn selling the goat's milk, and Beatrice is able to finally realize her dream of attending school.

The children and I talked about how fortunate we are to be in a community that is abounding with resources. We have countless gifts on a daily basis. We realized that simply attending school is a gift that not everyone in the world has access to. The children are being encouraged to set a reading goal for the summer, and collect pledges from sponsors to contribute to Heifer International. Not only will the children be strengthening the wonderful reading skills that they have, but they will also be working to *give the gift of a goat* to a family in the world who could use one.

G'Day!

Click here to see our projects!

Over the last several weeks, the children have been immersed in their studies of the Land Down Under! They've been working on a UBD (also known as an Understanding by Design) project.  Their goal was to answer this essential question:  "Why would someone want to visit, or live, in this territory of Australia?" Broken into 7 small groups, the students studied a particular region of Australia.  They read books, viewed movie clips, and surfed through websites to find all of the pertinent information they could find. They practiced creating an ongoing bibliography by recording each of their sources, and they documented their facts collaboratively as a group. Once the research was complete, the children literally cut apart their notes and separated them into categories. After looking at their information, they decided how the categories should be labeled.  (These included landforms, sites to see, jobs, interesting animals, etc.) Finally, using Garage Band, the children verbally recorded their research into podcasts, which we then imported into a Keynote presentation. After adding photos that helped illustrate their research, the wonderful LMC ladies helped us lock these presentations into a movie! The children's projects can be found here!
http://www.sd25.org/~mfijor/Dryden2/Dryden_2.0/2nd_Grade/Pages/Miss_OSullivans_Australia_Projects.html

Special thanks to Mrs. Dufern, Mrs. Powers, Mrs. Kenney, and Mrs. Breaux who helped guide us smoothly through the process, and all of the parent volunteers who helped make this engaging learning experience so successful: Mr. Rolla, Mrs. Santangelo, Mrs. Panarese, and Mrs. Coney!  Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Salutations!

The children and I have begun reading one of my favorite stories of all time! As we share our last read aloud of the year, the children are currently meeting the characters of Avery, Wilbur, Templeton and Charlotte. What a wonderful book to end with as we see a friendship develop between two such unlikely characters. It is exciting to watch the children become so eager to hear the next part of the story each day. They are beginning to develop the sense that they truly know these characters, and are showing genuine concern for their well-being! We are also using the "read aloud" time to practice all of the comprehension strategies we have been working on this year, including: using background knowledge, visualizing, asking questions, making predictions, making connections, inferring, and drawing conclusions. I am also a firm believer that reading aloud to the children encourages the children to then want to read to themselves!

Speaking of reading, our last book orders of the school year went home today! Since we won't have school again until June 2nd, the only way to place your book club order this time around will be online, to ensure that the books will arrive in time.

 In order to place your last book order of the school year, visit:

http://pcool.scholastic.com/parentordering/login.jsp

username: osullivan

password: bookorders

 Orders are due the morning of Monday, May 31st.

Happy reading this summer!

Making Paper

The children had an in-school field trip last week as we wrapped up our unit on Saving the Earth. The ladies from The Grove in Glenview came to show the children how to make paper! They also showed them how to sort their garbage. Finally, the children made an art project out of reused materials! What a great way to wrap up our unit!

 Here, the children are tearing up used paper into small bits.

     After adding some water, everyone got the chance to help blend the paper into a slurry substance.

Max placed a screen over a bowl.

Adam and Albie helped poured the substance over the screen.

Adam and Lily lined up a piece of foam to press the water out. Evelyn and Max watch as paper begins to take shape in front of them!

David presses out any excess water with a rolling pin.

Here the children are sorting garbage into items that can be recycled, donated, or simply thrown in the garbage.

Zach and Tyler are making flowers out of an egg carton and scraps of colorful magazine paper!

Sophia, Ashley and Lily are hard at work!

What a fun time we had doing our part to help the planet!

Budding Entrepreneurs!

The children had their first Junior Achievement lesson yesterday! We are lucky enough to have a wonderful JA volunteer by the name of Colleen Younan. She works for Motorola in the area of finance. She will be coming in to teach the children 5 lessons. The theory behind Junior Achievement is below, as stated in their website.

"JA Worldwide is the world’s largest organization dedicated to educating students about workforce readiness, entrepreneurship and financial literacy through experiential, hands-on programs. 

Junior Achievement programs help prepare young people for the real world by showing them how to generate wealth and effectively manage it, how to create jobs which make their communities more robust, and how to apply entrepreneurial thinking to the workplace. Students put these lessons into action and learn the value of contributing to their communities."

During their upcoming lessons, the children will be thinking about the businesses that exist in the community, how taxes are collected and used, and how money flows from people to different businesses.  They will also be thinking about the effectiveness of unit vs. assembly production. The children will assemble paper donuts using both methods, and decide which way allowed them to accomplish the most.  Finally, the class will be presented with a variety of potential new businesses that would like to move in to the community, and they will have to vote as a class for which one would make the most sense for the needs of the community. 

Our lessons will be taking place over the next few Wednesday/Friday afternoons, so be sure to ask the children what they've learned!

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!

During one of our science lessons this week, the children were able to see how they could re-use something from their very own homes.  After learning about the 3 Rs: Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle, the children realized that finding new uses for old things not only makes less garbage, but it preserves some of our natural resources! For a special assignment, they were asked to bring in a used milk gallon container. The children spruced up their milk gallons with some green and blue paint, added some bird seed and a perch, and tied a string on top in order to make their very own earth-friendly bird feeders!  What a fun and practical way to help our Earth!