Lots of Learning!

 Anchor Charts

I never underestimate a good anchor chart. I often see students look to it to double check themselves and

even after I've taken one down they still look in the direction of where it was hanging as if they can see the invisible words still there.

Lately, we've been working on on -ed and -ing suffixes and it gets pretty confusing because there are a lot of special cases, but I think this really helped clear some things up. 

The biggest thing I've been trying to do lately is have interactive anchor charts. I think this makes the class pay even more attention to what the message is because they are interacting with the chart and building to it as the week progresses.

For this biography chart, all the students were reading different
biographies and looking for commonalities that were in all or most of the biographies that they'd read. This was a great way to help prepare the class for our biography research project that we're working on now!

Text structure was a real struggle until I started this anchor chart. I'd gone through my classroom library, chosen books that fit into different categories, copied the cover and then had the class work in small groups to read or reread the books and categorize them. The pair or group would have to then defend their answer to the class by giving examples from the book that fit into the category. It was great practice and the class loved doing it!

I plan on having at least one interactive anchor chart going on in my room at all times! It's so great to see them enjoying building up their learning :)

Subtraction with Regrouping

This is always so tough for 2nd graders, but this anchor chart was on pinterest and it shows a neat strategy that I really used this year that helped the class a lot. We used highlighters while working on our subtraction problems and after we'd highlight the larger number in the ones, then we'd say which rule it followed "More on TOP no need to STOP," "More on the FLOOR go next DOOR and get 10 MORE" or "Numbers the SAME zero is your GAME." 

I highly recommend this strategy. I plan to use it for next year for sure!

Martin Luther King Day

I added to what I'd done in the past for MLK day (see previous post-- in tags). I still had the students watch Dr. King's speech and write a summary of his speech and create their own dreams, but this time I put them all together in a class book. The class has really enjoyed being able to read their classmates dreams of how they want to help make the world a better place.

We started by brainstorming a list of people who still need help today and then talked about how to could help those people-- what did they need help with. As always, there are some very caring and creative students in class :)

I also used symbaloo to create a bunch of video and text resources about Dr. King that I then posted on the class Edmodo so they could watch any of the videos again or look through pictures or read his biography. Here is a link to that if you're interested in checking it out: MLK Symbaloo.

Reflection

I'll try to post again soon! I'm really enjoying my new school, but I continue to come of with more and more ideas for next year and how I want to keep growing so I'm not great at keeping up with this. I know this summer though that I'll be posting a lot! I've already started planning some projects so be looking for that!

Smart Board Interactive Websites!

Okay so this is going to be a really short post, but I was very excited to share some news. All of the teachers at my school are getting smart boards! I am busy looking into great resources to use in my classroom with my smart board. I just wanted to share some of what I found and if you have any suggestions for more ideas feel free to post. BTW all of the sites are FREE!

I am very excited to use this as a classroom management system. Class Dojo is this awesome site that lets you create little icons for each of your students and during class you can give points to students to reward them for being helpful, participating, doing well with partners, etc. You can also take away points for negative behaviors. I LOVE that parents can also log on at any time to see how their child is doing. I'm planning on using it to reward students once they reach a certain amount of points.

I'm also looking at working on nouns, verbs, and adjectives soon and I found this game that I thought would be great to play as a class. It's called Noun Dunk. I think they kids would be excited about getting up to play the game. It's fun to check out if you have the time!

The last one that I think I'll have to try out is mainly for science. I've used it before hooked up through my Document Camera (through the computer), but being able to create the static electricity and do the different experiments by actually touching the balloons together on the screen would be a ton of fun! The main website has tons of science interactive demonstrations where the students need to move items to create reactions. The site is called Engineering Interact and I recommend it!

One more goodie that I want to share has to do with place value. It's like Pacman, but with place value! Looks like a super fun game that we could play together and then I could have them practice on their own on laptops! It's called Place Value Eaters!

I hope you enjoyed all of the goodies! I am very excited for a smart board and excited to let the kids use their hands with this technology for learning!