100th Day and More!

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It was a busy buzzing week in our second grade classroom and you can see it all in the collage of photos above.

In Readers Workshop we talked about the three main elements of reading with fluency: volume, clarity, and expression. The readers then got a chance to practice reading fluency phrases with a reading partner. Their goal was to read chorally the first time through and then reread to each other making their voices sound like talking.

In Writers Workshop we are writing trouble stories. We began the unit by looking at examples of trouble stories like Knuffle Bunny and Fred Stays with Me. Then we headed off in partners to practice oral storytelling about our own trouble stories. Then we began to get our stories down on paper. Next week, we will practice turning these stories into fiction pieces by changing the characters names to tell the story in third person.

The highlight of the week was when we celebrated the 100th day of school on Wednesday. The students did an amazing job with their independent projects at home and you can see the variety and creativity in the slide show above. They were really thinking outside the box and exceeded my expectations! We celebrated the number 100 all day with math challenges, writing 100 words, spelling many words from the word 100, eating a gorp made up of 19 groups of 100, and writing about what life will be like in 100 years.

After reading the book Kindness Is Cooler, Mrs. Ruler, we have started our own kindness challenge in our classroom. We are hoping to collect 100 acts of kindness between the 100th day and Valentine's Day. The students can do these acts at home, in school, or in the community. When they have a kindness to report they write it on a kindness heart and we check in at morning meeting each day to calculate how many hearts we have earned as a team. So far we are almost half way there!