ImaginOcean Creatures

We started off the week with a wonderful trip to the Flynn Theater to see John Tartaglia's ImaginOcean musical. The students really enjoyed the use of black light puppetry and the entertaining songs stuck in our heads for the entire week. When we returned to school we had a great discussion about the play. The main character, Dorsal had to overcome a lot of fears to solve a problem. We all shared about a time that we had to overcome a fear to do something that we wanted to do. Then we used our own imaginations to create a new ocean character for the play. After making our characters we all thought about the different characteristics that our creature would have. What do they like to do? What are they afraid of? What words describe the character? I used the iPad to take photographs of the student's creatures and then we used Voice Thread to narrate our writing pieces. This was such a fun way to connect our field trip with art, writing, and technology.
When you view the Voice Thread you can make a comment by recording your own voice or typing in a comment that will appear on the side. I'm sure that your child would love to hear from you about their piece.

In Readers Workshop we began working on writing a book review to culminate our unit of study on books in a series. On Tuesday, we will be heading down to share our books and recommendations with the students in Mrs. Dyer's class. I know that the second graders will get those new readers excited about the many different books that they have become experts on.

In Readers Workshop the students had another opportunity to practice the steps to writing a constructed response. This time they worked more independently to answer the question, what makes Allen Brook a great school? Using the hamburger paragraph format they constructed a response that included a topic sentence, supporting detail sentences, and a concluding sentence.

This week in math we began a new unit in Bridges Math. We will be investigating geometry by observing and describe shapes, measuring the area of shapes, and using reasoning skills to pull apart and put together shapes using different tools.