Busy Bees

The past two school days have flown by in a blur! We began our third artist in residency on Friday. Margaret Hasse, a poet has been working with the students on writing poems that will go along with their pond art. On Friday, students wrote a letter/poem to the pond and asked it questions. Today, students chose one creature and wrote a poem all about it. So far, the students have had a wonderful time. I can’t wait to see their final poems!

Today in Daily 5, we introduced Work on Writing. The students love their writing time so much that this part of Daily 5 is very motivating to them. In this part of Daily 5, students write stories to go with pictures they have already drawn or write new stories that they will add pictures to later.

In math, students learned the counting back method of subtraction. Tomorrow we will learn the counting up method. I have moved our Unit 2 test to next week. With our artist in residency, math time is cut short and I want to make sure that we have enough time to get to everything that will be assessed and teach it well. There is no point in hurrying through a lesson if the students will not understand it or be able to do it in the future.

Ms. Paxton has been teaching the 2^nd graders all about being a class leader. 3 students were chosen to be the candidates for a special role in the classroom. They have worked together in “Campaign Teams” to create posters that will promote their candidate. Soon, students will vote for one leader.

Today we did Word Detective for bossy r words. Finding a good pattern has been difficult for us. We will continue our search for words tomorrow and will come up with a pattern to help us remember when to us –ir, -er, and –ur.