Mexico, Snowmen, and Seuss Oh My!

So a lot has been happening this week, we are in the middle of our Social Studies Unit on Mexico, and we painted ponchos on Tuesday, and we had a Mexican Market today. The ponchos are 12"x18" pieces of art paper that we painted stripes on with watercolour paper. Next week we will tape the two papers together, cut out a head hole and Voila! Poncho-riffic!

 The Mexican Market is where students bring small items from home (toys, books, candy, cookies etc.) and trade them with the other kids for things that they want. Students are not quite sure about it at the beginning (they don't always want to part with their things) but by the end they are over the moon excited about their new treasures.

This week we also had the Spanish 11 class bring 4 pinatas to our campus for our class and another grade two class to break open. They taught us the pinata breaking song, and we had a lot of fun hitting the pinatas, it was a little wild but so worth it!

Our second art project this week was the first project in our unit on perspective. We made torn paper snowmen. It is amazing how hard tearing paper is for 7/8 year olds! But they always end up looking great!  It's amazing how many expressions snowmen have!!

sad/troubled snowman

 content/reflective snowman

We also started our Dr. Seuss Author study. We are working on rhyming words, and using our imagination to create fantastical objects/animals. We worked on creating our own zoos after reading "If I Ran the Zoo"

I can't wait to see them when they are finished, but we had a lot of giggles and sharing happening during this activity!

A New Year and Patterns

So we started the week off with patterns in Math, and our culminating activity was making a quilt block. We were able to talk about symmetry and design as well. It was hard for some of the more spatially challenged to place the triangle pieces correctly, but in the end I think that they are quite stunning and the prep for them was very minimal!! The dimensions are 2" squares cut from coloured photocopy paper and 11" square from white photocopy paper and a 12" piece of construction paper. The students needed 4 squares of one colour and 7 squares of another colour. I had them fold the white paper in half both ways to create a centre line, then they could line up the points of the diamonds with the centre and the line. The triangles were harder to explain, so I went around and showed them one if they couldn't get it. Next week we are starting our math rotation for measurement. I will be doing the measuring weight strand and the other two are doing linear measurement and capacity. (More to follow on that). 

We also wrote some new year's goals. I stole borrowed two ideas from two amazing sites (via pinterest of course) and mashed them together with a little tweaking for this project. 

The students used 2013 as the number of examples they needed to provide for each goal.

They wrote 2 ways they could be a better student, something they wanted to try and do more often or better, 1 person they want to get to know better, and 3 ways they could be a better friend.

Then they coloured in a new years hat, and drew a face, I added a little noise maker when I put them on the wall. Pretty cute, and a good way to start the year, thinking about little (but concrete) ways to be a better them.

New iPads and Christmas Art

So our final 10 iPads came in today which brought our total to 15, and so naturally I used them with my class as soon as they were all ready to go! We had so much fun, though they were a little sad they had to share! It was so nice to share new technology with some of them but it didn't surprise me that most of them knew how to use it already. One comment I heard, was "oh, this is just like a big iPhone" which is so funny to me because that is what I said as a reason for me not to buy my own personal one! So we checked out some of the apps, and they practiced some math skills. The apps we used were, Splash Math: Grade 2, Penguin Jump, Motion Math Hungry Fish, Kaleidoscope Drawing Pad (which is pretty cool but not "educational" per se) and Chicktionary which was hard for them.

We also started one of our many Christmas art projects, our paper nativity scenes. These are always cute, and easy and this is the first year no one drew faces on Mary, Joseph or Baby Jesus. So that was a plus! They did however, use the scraps of paper to make mustaches and beards, and tape them onto their faces and then asked to be called Mr.Beard (who is out PE specialist). So it was a typical Friday in Grade 2!!

Student Writing

I love reading students' writing. Here are some gems, the first batch is our "triple scoop words" writing project, the second is our simile project and the last are our rendition of the story, "Never Take A Shark to the Dentist" by Judi Barrett

Pop Art

We are starting our unit on Pop Art as made famous by Andy Warhol. We have completed one project and are in the midst of our second. I love this unit because the projects are so colourful! Here is our POP art ( I love me a good play on words!) 

 I found this project on Pinterest (of course) and loved the graphic nature and the simplicity. I found a picture of a coke bottle online, printed it in greyscale on regular photocopy paper, cropped the paper a bit so there was not as much to colour, and the kids did the rest!

Our second project is handprints (another pinteresting idea) and we're not all done yet, but they are really taking shape.

Students trace their hands 4 times and colour their hands and backgrounds with pencil crayon or crayon in different colours (you could do complimentary colours). Then I paint their hand with black tempera paint and they "stamp" their hands on top of the coloured hands.

On a side note, I love having a coloured wall to hand art on, so much better than white, (imho).

Fall Writing and Art

This week we made Q-tip trees and we wrote a poem on Fall. It was a cute little project and looks great. I was very happy with some of the words and ideas that the kids shared about what Fall looks like, sounds like, feels like, and smells like and what they love about Fall. They loved the foam and felt stickers I got on sale at Michaels! haha

Triple Scoop Words

So this week I went to an Adrienne Gear workshop. She is a teacher/Language Specialist from the Vancouver School District. She is an amazing speaker and has a great reading and writing program. I have been using many of her ideas over the past couple years, but not as consistently as I should would like to. One of the biggest ideas I got from her this time, was the two overarching goals she has for her students' writing. She explains that good writers keep their reader interested and to write in such a way as to not confuse them..She has several writing techniques that teach kids how to engage their reader, and to keep their writing organized. In my class we will be talking about these techniques over the course of the year and putting them into practice as much as possible. This week we started talking about the writing technique of triple scoop words. One way that writers keep their readers engaged is by choosing interesting words that convey ideas and meaning more effectively than more simple words. We read some books, in particular, Max's Castle by Kate Banks which is a great book, and talked about what makes a word a triple scooper. I had them think about ice cream and how getting one scoop of ice cream is ok, but it doesn't make you excited or happy, it doesn't leave you satisfied, but if you got three giant scoops of ice cream with toppings you are way more excited and are totally satisfied with the amount of ice cream you got. The same goes with words in your writing, you can say something is fun, but the word fun is a little boring, it doesn't make the reader want to read more. However the word entertaining or engaging or stupendous would be much more interesting. So we went through a bunch of single scoop words and came up with synonyms for those words (for older kids a Thesaurus would be a great tool to use), and wrote them down on a piece of paper to have for future reference. I was amazed at some of the words they were able to come up with.

Triple Scoop Words

The next day we did a fun little project that showcased some of our triple scoop words.

Most of the students understood the concept of putting the single scoop word on the bottom and the better words on the top....as you can see not everyone listened...... ;)
Next week we will be putting our triple scoop words into action when we write about emotions (because good writers want their readers to connect to their writing). We'll see how it goes....