Pope Francis : a Second Grade study!

This week in honor of Pope Francis and his visit to the United States, we've gone pope crazy! We've been projecting him onto our whiteboard and watching him live all week! On Tuesday, we cheered when he landed in D.C. and watched him meet and shake hands with President Obama.

We then read about his trip to the states, from an amazing freebie provided by Catholic Cutie. We answered fun discussion questions about where they would want to take the pope, and how we can listen to his message and make the world a better place. I loved looking at all the responses my students came up with. One little boy wanted to show him our classroom, while another thought the pope might like to go to Hawaii and relax! 

Yesterday, we watched part of the canonization mass of Saint Junipero Serra and created a fun directed drawing of the pope. Here you can see a simple video of me drawing it step by step! I obviously went much MUCH slower with my kiddos. 

We ended up hanging our drawings alongside our Catholic cutie discussion questions on our second grade board in the faculty room. I love how they all are turned out!! 

Today, we also learned some fun interesting facts about the pope (Did you know he used to own a Harley-Davidsons!? and that he once was a bouncer in a bar!?), while creating cute little pope puppets from Catholic Icing!

My students absolutely loved them. They kept him on their desks all day and talked to him, while they worked. I wish I could have posted a picture of them "buddy reading" with Pope Francis! But here you can see the Pope hanging out with them, while they worked on ST Math during Math rotations today instead! 

Tomorrow, we're going to end our wonderful week with Pope Francis by watching him visit schools in New York! We're also going to do a fun interactive project with our classroom iPads, where students will receive a Pope Francis quote and use their iPads to record what they think that quote means and how we can use that quote to help ourselves grow both in our faith and our relationships with others. I can't wait! 

It's definitely weeks like these that make me so beyond glad to be teaching at a Catholic school! :) 

A Crowley Christmas

Thanks for being so patient with me this year! Here are the picture worthy activities of December! We did so many fun things in such a short time!

At the beginning of December we read the book, "The Biggest Christmas tree ever" by Steven Kroll. If you've never read it before, it's about two mice who fall in love with the same tree. It's a great book to teach character perspective, which is what we worked on in December. After reading it, my students discussed how everyone thinks their Christmas Tree is the biggest and best and how perspective and point of view plays into your opinions. They then created their own Christmas trees! 

This was my favorite project we did this December. I found these on a website online and just loved them. The directions are here. We learned all about the birth of Jesus and then created these beautiful stain glass nativity scenes. We hung them in our windows so that everyone could enjoy them! 

I love their little hands holding them up to the light. 

We also created an advent chain that we hung in the window too. We learned all about the four weeks of advent and what they stood for. I then handed out three purple and one pink strips of paper to each kid. They had to write four different ways they were going to prepare for the birth of Jesus. We attached all the pieces together and created a chain that hung throughout the three huge windows into my classroom. It reminded us throughout the month to ready our hearts for his coming.

Here you can see the pinecone Christmas trees that we created as one of the two gifts we made our Parents for Christmas. Attached to the tree we tied Diamante poems. You can see an example of one of the ones the kids wrote below.

  The poem was a great  way to review parts of speech! They had to include 2 nouns, 4 adjectives, 6 verbs and one phrase about Christmas time.

The other gift we created was a Christmas cookbook. Each child wrote a recipe for something they love that their parents make them for dinner. It was a complete secret and they had to write the recipe from memory. It was great way to practice writing directions in proper sequence. It was also wonderful to see their interpretation of what their parents did to make them food. We took all of their recipes and bound them into a book that they gave their on Christmas morning. 

Chocolate Cursive! At my new school cursive is taught starting in January of Second grade. My partner teacher, Lisa, and I decided to get out some of those pre-Christmas break wiggles by practicing cursive strokes in chocolate pudding. The kids loved it! What a great Hook to start learning cursive!  

We also worked with adjectives in December. We added them to our writing to paint vivid pictures in our readers' heads and even created our own Christmas Adjective tree to spruce up our classroom for the Holidays. (wink* wink* pun intended!) Each child created their own adjective ornament. 

In the last week of school before break, we had two parties. We celebrated as a class with our room moms and also celebrated with our fifth grade buddies. Our fifth grade buddies helped us make Nutter Butter reindeer while we watched a Christmas song sing-a-long video. Some of them turned out super cute. Unfortunately, most of them were eaten before I had a chance to snap a picture. 

During our class party, our room moms helped us create these adorable donut snowmen too! Who doesn't love eating adorably made Christmas snacks!? Can't wait to make the snowmen again next year! They were delicious :D.

In Math we worked on Multiplication. We used m&m's and cheerios to create arrays and make equal groups to learn multiplication.  

We then created these adorable Christmas lights to practice and memorize our 2's times tables. 

December was such a busy Month! We also celebrated our First Reconciliation! I love getting to be a part of their overall preparation for the sacraments. It's so special! Our school requires that we test their memorization of the Act of Contrition. The picture above shows how nervous they were for it! I found this paper in our turn in box. So adorable! 

First Reconciliation Resource

Finally, my students worked on Character perspective in the month of December. We culminated our study by creating our own stories. The kids chose to write the story of Rudolph the Red nosed reindeer from either Santa or Rudolph's perspective. We practiced using personal pronouns and adjectives in our writing. When they finished every step of the Writing Process and were ready to "publish" it (Hang it on our wall), they were given the chance to create these cuties to hang with their writing. They made my classroom so festive! 

Hope you and your family had a great Holiday! <3

November 2013

Hey everybody. Sorry I've been so terrible this year about updating my blog. I've been so busy transitioning to a new school, new community and whole new set of school expectations that I've let the blog slip by. My goal for 2014 is to at least update once a month. So here are some of the things we worked on in my classroom in November! Hope you enjoy!

In Math we worked on Subtraction! We started by practicing two digit subtraction and made these adorable turkeys to hang on our cabinets!

We also spent  a ton of time mastering 3 digit subtraction. Here you can see the cornucopia that we created as a class for Thanksgiving. Each student was given a fruit or a vegetable with a 3 digit subtraction problem. They had to solve the problem, and color it. We then placed them in our classroom window with a sign that said, "Thank goodness for Math!" The kids came up with the slogan. They thought it was hilarious. 

In the month of November we also spent a ton of time learning about the pilgrims and Native Americans that lived in our country along time ago. We studied pilgrim society, reading books like, "Samuel Eaton: A day in the life of a pilgrim boy" and "Sarah Morton: A day in the life of a pilgrim girl." We compared our own lives today to their lives back then. The kids made these pilgrims and wrote information they learned about the pilgrim boys and girls on the back of their heads. 

For our November Mass, we created an alter cloth using these leaves. Each child in K-2 wrote something they were thankful for on a paper leaf and then watercolored it. We taped them to a white cloth and laid it on the alter for mass. It was beautiful! 

In class we read the book, "Too Many Turkeys" by Linda White. I just love her! We compared it to her book, "Too Many pumpkins" and discussed how interesting her characters are. The kids especially loved the character Buford, the turkey. We decided to make our own class Buford. For homework, each child took home a feather and decorated it anyway they wanted. We then put them together. I think it turned out really fun!   

 Along with our study of pilgrim society, we also studied Native Americans. We learned about the impact white settlers had on them, and learned that not every Native American tribe is the same. Students split into groups and researched different tribes. They created these posters and made videos about each tribe. You can check out the videos below at the first link. You can also check out a more comprehension explanation of this study at the second link. 

Videos

Lesson PLan

This month in Writing we focused on persuasive writing. Common Core standards require that second graders be able to determine the purpose and reasoning behind a text. As a result we decided to create our own stories persuading readers to eat something other than turkey for Thanksgiving. We learned different ways that writers attempt to persuade their writers and then created our own stories. If you're interested in the resources I used for this project. You can find them here. 

Finally, we learned about Saints! We put on a Saints play and researched the parts we played. The kids learned about "see not think" drawing and drew their saints based off of famous paintings. They then had to work on writing informative pieces about their saints. Each child was given a biographical article on their saint and a trackstar site that they could further research their saint on the classroom iPads. If you're interested in recreating the project, my resources are available here. There are 30 different Saints to choose from and the link to the websites for the Saints. I'm currently trying to make the Saints book into an accessible iBook or Shutterfly book. I'll post information about it when I do. More examples of the project lie below. 

http://holyspiritschool2mc.blogspot.com/2013/11/saint-project.html

Learning about Baptism

One of the greatest things about being a second grade teacher at a Catholic school is getting to teach the kids all about the sacraments. For the last month we've been learning all about Baptism. We've learned the vocabulary, the stories and the symbols. We spent a lot of time learning the different parts of the ceremony and what each symbol represents. 

They then learned all about their own baptisms. They researched the day, the time, the presiding priest, the parish and how they reacted when they were anointed with oil and water. They created baptismal collages and presented their own baptisms to their classmates. Below you can see some of the collages they created. The collages had to include the different symbols they'd learned about. 

To finish up our study of baptism our own school priest offered to hold a teddy bear baptism. Having never attended a teddy bear baptism, I wasn't quite sure what to expect. We followed an example found on teacherspayteachers (Teddy Bear Baptism) and had a wonderful time!

Students brought in either a teddy bear or beloved stuffed animal from home. They gave it a baptismal name and created a candle and a baptismal gown. They even picked suitable godparents for their bears. (I am currently godmother to 7 bears, an alligator and a baby doll.)

Finally, we walked over to the church and our priest explained the different steps of baptism. He used the time to have the kids express what they had learned and share their understanding. He talked about the official words used in baptism and even had the kids sprinkle a little holy water on their bears heads from the baptismal font.

I was extremely impressed by my students ability to not only answer Father's questions, but to also explain what they had learned. A teddy bear baptism, although rather unconventional, was an excellent performance assessment for our study on the sacrament of baptism.

Pinwheels for Peace!

        Second grade paired up with their fifth grade buddies to create pinwheels for pinwheel for peace day. They colored, cut and assembled over 60 pinwheels that they placed in the grass in front of the school.  They prayed for peace and discussed ways that they could encourage peace not only in their own school and community, but in their world as well. Many of them stated with such honesty and intensity that they believed that it was important for kids to be leaders for peace. I was so impressed by their want and desire to change the world. Hopefully they won't give up on such a lofty dream. 

It was a beautiful sign of peace in 2nd and 5th grade! I loved helping my kiddos play a role in striving for peace.