Another Year! Another Start!

Brag Tags, Bulletin Boards and Back to School goodies!! 

My Writing Wall, Birthday Board, Art Boxes and Class Library!  

       Happy Sunday! As we get ready to start our fifth week, I can't believe how much we've done! Boy, have we been busy! I finally had a chance to post, so get ready for a long one!

Spotted this year in Second grade is not only a brand new class of students but a freshly made Back to School bulletin board!!! This year I went with the ladybug theme for my board. I hand cut and glued 25 ladybugs on neon pink paper and cut out a fun saying using my cricut.  Although its not in this picture, each lady bug now has a student's name written in silver sharpie on the center black strip. The board is bright and extra cheerful!

I also took the time to update my birthday board, create fun new labels for my student art boxes and to switch my typical AR board to a BRAG tag board! That's right! I finally jumped on board (Pun intended! lol!) with BRAG tags!

Brag tag Board! 

Brag Tags

My friend, Isobel, came up with an amazing way to twist Brag tags to best fit our school, so that we can keep our traditional behavior system while still offering them as positive incentives for hard work! If you've read my blog before, you'll know that my school focuses on encouraging student reading, mastery of learning material and growth mindset each year by utilizing technology and celebration! Students in the past have received stickers for books that they've read, class dance breaks for learning, and lunch with the teacher for hard work, effort and overall kindness to others.

So with Isobel's amazing idea, we're taking our traditional AR boards and turning them into celebration boards, using brag tags. Students receive indivudal brag tags for reading AR books, passing levels in our differentiated software (ST MATH and LEXIA), caring for others, learning from their mistakes and extra hard work and effort! Everyone in the class at the same time will receive tags for mastering tricky material, finishing up fun projects, learning our prayers, and getting compliments from other teachers or admin! They will also be getting beads they can add to their tag necklaces for winning pod points. We'll be keeping our traditional behavior system but utilizing brag tags as a way to celebrate master and offer that extra positive incentive. I'm excited to see how it goes!

Bulletin Boards

My classroom has an endless amount of bulletin boards. This year, in addition to taping student work onto cabinets, doors, and windows,  I will be utilizing two boards for student work. The first board is nearly the same from last year, except that I added those adorable pencil clips from the Dollar Spot at Target! Here you can see them holding up one of my favorite Back to School activities: "I am excited to "BEE" in Second Grade." The cute bee craft is from Rhonda Baldacchino on TPT. However, I changed the paper he's holding! 

The Second bulletin board currently has my favorite new Back to School activity, using Emojis! I printed off some adorable clipart from Teachers Resource Force and had students cut out the face parts and glue them on yellow paper plates! They then had to write a sentence about Second grade during the first week. On the back of the plates they wrote reasons for those feelings. I didn't know what to expect when we started the project, but I couldn't have been more excited for how it turned out! Don't they all look so cute! 

Back to School Goodies

The last thing I wanted to share today is my Back to School goodies! I love sending my students and coworkers off on the first day of school with a cheesy but fun treat! I absolutely love making them and I really think it helps me show how truly thankful I am to get to spend a school year with them! In the past, I've sent my students home with packets of teddy grahams that say, " I am beary excited to have you in my class" but this year I sent my amazing fiancé to the store to get them and they were ALL gone! He went to four stores and finally just came home with Animals crackers! So he and I put our heads together and came up with an even cheesier tag! We added tons of animal puns to tell my students that "I'm WILD about having them in my class!"

Here you can see a picture of how they turned out! You can also see the highlighters that I gave to my co-workers! We're writing our WCEA document this year and figured we could all use another highlighter! I attached cute little tags with a little blue ribbon and dropped them in their school mailboxes! And because you managed to read all the way down to bottom of this crazy long post, I've posted these tags for free in my TPT store! I hope you enjoy them! 

Thanks so much for Reading! 

First Day of School 2016! 

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Back to School Gifts

It's been an awesome "Back to School" so far! I was excited to see how quickly my new class jumped into the classroom procedures and routines. They're just the cutest little things! I can't wait to watch them learn and grow this year! :)

As I'm still pulling together pictures from my first week and half, I thought I would share the little gifts I pulled together for some of my new coworkers, many of whom are first time teachers!

In the picture on the left, you will see some simple mason jars purchased in the dollar aisle of Walgreens! I filled them with emergency chocolate, magnets, safety pins, erasers, paper clips and gum. I then attached a cute pencil magnet I found at the Dollar Tree with a rubber band!

In front of the mason jars is an adorable pencil case that I found at Safeway and filled with emergency chocolate for my aide! I got a little cheesy with the tag. ;)

Finally in the picture on the right, you will see my silly "Sea" basket that I created for a new coworker who's starting her first year and has an ocean themed classroom! It too is filled with fun new teacher items and even some cool anchor duck tape that I found at Safeway!

I had so much fun making these little gifts and am beyond excited to be working with such amazing and wonderful people! It's going to be a great year!

I Am...

slightly overwhelmed.

Transitioning to a new school has been way harder than I thought it would be. The most difficult part being the confusion and learning curve that comes with any new adventure. I've now been working here almost two months and despite an amazing staff, who is always ready to help me, there are still so many things I just don't know. As a result, the OCD perfectionist side of me is going a little crazy.

I'm used to being so organized and so ahead of every step. Yet for some reason, no matter how hard I attack that "to do" list, its never getting any shorter. I guess that's typical for any teacher though. However, I hope I can knock some of those bigger items off soon. I'll keep you all posted.

Anyways... I wanted to give you just a sneak peek into my plan for the year. As someone who loves organization,  was trained to backwards plan, and luckily has a partner teacher who loves to do so as well, I already have a rough idea of how I'm going to attempt this whole modified expedition at a blended learning school.

This year we're going to create a blended expedition or blended style project titled "Who are we?" As a class we're going to think about that question throughout our learning.
We're going to explore...
who we are as Catholics...
who we are as Americans...
and who we are as members of our families and our community.
We're going to look at our heritage, our history, our influence on both society and the environment, as well as the role we play as students at our school.

It's going to be a study where, we look at how we use what we know and what we learn to understand who we are. I'm hoping its awesome.



To kick off the study and overall expedition... we began looking at who our students think they are now.

We looked at famous self portraits by different artists, including Frida Kala's "Self Portrait with Monkey" and Van Gogh's self portraits. We discussed symmetry and how artists often draw through the use of symmetry. They learned how to draw themselves as cartoons and created their own self portrait.

We then discussed how one can also share who they are through more than just pictures, but the use of words. We described ourself in detail through the writing, "I am" poems. Its amazing what insight they provide into the minds of who these kids think they are. I posted two, although I changed their names and just kept their words.

Our next step is to work on learning about where specifically in the world we live and how it relates to the rest of the world geographically. Then we're going to create timelines of our lives and discuss becoming members of the church through baptism. I'll post more soon.

Until then check back later this week for a post on our field trip to an apple farm! I can't wait to pick apples and make applesauce with the kids. It's going to be great! :) 

Can you guess the Second Grader?

One of my favorite beginning of the school year activities is to teach my students to draw cartoons of themselves through the use of lines and symmetry. This year rather than simply drawing self portraits, we used it as a way to decorate for our Back to School Night. We wrote clues and asked parents to guess the Second Grader. We then posted them on our Second Grade Work wall. They turned out great! I was extremely proud of their hard work.

Back to School

So the new year has begun! The classroom is all set up and the students are back. They've settled into the routines, learned the rules, practiced them over and over again and have begun to learn how to proceed through centers. We've mastered "Read to Self," have completed our first writing project and have reviewed fact families and missing addends. We've done a lot in two weeks, and I'm already so excited about what this year is going to bring.

This past thursday we had Back to School Night.  I met all the parents and handed out a variety of resources, including an extremely modified version of the handbook below. I've included a link below to our second grade handbook! We discussed the curriculum for the year, as well as what to expect along the way. I went over my procedures, and my philosophy on teaching and met each and every parent. It was a great night.

http://www.scribd.com/doc/165033557/Second-Grade-Handbook

It's going to be a great year!

All About Me

Sorry everyone for the lack of posts these last few weeks. My house had a little set back with Internet and its been a little difficult getting everything done at Starbucks. But I'm back! and I'm posting about an amazing activity my second graders did at the beginning of the school year.

This past August I had a whole group of brand new kids enter both my class and the school. They hadn't been part of the 1st grade community and as a result my class had some difficulty getting along at first. What better way to learn about each other than to start with a writing project?! I seriously wish I had done this last year. They turned out so cute! and they really helped build a new and stronger classroom community.

My All about Me project had students write all about themselves and then present their work to their class. I used it as our introductory unit to both each other and to the Writing Process. I also used it as a way to work on following directions.

We started the project by learning to divide a pre-made head and shoulders, up using lines to create the symmetry of a face. I instructed them on where and how to draw cartoon looking eyes and where a nose, eyebrows and mouth would appear when dividing a face. This gave them structure to their drawings, while at the same time allowing for creativity as to exactly how they chose to color and draw each facial feature. Approaching the art this way offered me a great way to immediately assess who struggled with following simple directions.

The students were taught about what it means to brainstorm. We brainstormed all about what others might want to learn about ourselves. We then worked on Pre-writing, Revising, Rewriting and Publishing. It took us over a week to create their writings, but they turned out really good for a beginning of the year project.

After writing we held a classroom gallery walk and then the students presented their work to their classmates during our weekly class meeting.

Following the presentations, students were grouped in fours to play a game. With a timer and a simple four square foldable, groups had to write as much as they could remember from the presentations about about the individuals from a different group within 5 minutes. We played the game a few times, switching groups. My students loved it! They learned so much about each other. (and I learned so much about them too!)

Here are some of the finished pieces. I had a super hard time choosing which ones to post. I loved them all!