Welcome to School

We are off to a great start in second grade.   Welcome to Angel, Allison, Sebastian,   John, Oscar,  Jaidyn, James, Sophia, Brittany, Kaitlyn, Gabi, David, Elliot,  Nicolas,  Nikita,Liana, Monzerrat, and Will.    We are busy getting to know about each other.   Allison and Will are new to Rocky River.   Nakita shared Russian money with us today and counted in Russian for us.  Allison is going to teach us some things about Peru.   Some others will teach us other things about the Philippines, Vietnam and other Spanish speaking places.  The students are extremely interested in the blog site and asked can we do some of the same things this year.  They were amazed about the snow in New Zealand since it’s summer here in the USA.    They wanted to see all the blog sites for blogging friends we made last year. 

 North Carolina will experience a hurricane this weekend.    How much damage will it do?   What category of hurricane will it be when it strikes land?    Will 15 inches of rain really fall?   Will it move up the coast to New York?    The hurricane is named Irene.

  We are wondering what makes a hurricane?    How many different places have hurricanes?  Have you lived in an area that has experienced a hurricane?

 

 

Our New School Year -2011 -2012

Welcome back to school!  We will have an exciting year learning about many things and learning with others around the world.

 I will  introduce you to blogging this year.   We will learn so much about children in Australia, New Zealand, United Kingdom and Canada.  We will learn about students in other states within the United States.  We will compare things they learn with what we are learning at Rocky River and in  North Carolina. 

Our first science unit will be weather.   Did you know that in New Zealand they had snow this week?  I wonder what the weather is like in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom ?  How is their temperature different?   What season is it?    

Social Studies – we will learn about our classmates, make our new room into a community of learners that cooperate with each other and learn about good citizenship and rules.  We will continue to learn about other cultures , people and places throughout the year.

Reading Workshop–  as readers you will continue to develop as readers.   We will talk about our favorite books with classmates and will blog about some of our reading.   Second grade students develop stamina for reading, read with fluency and grow in higher level comprehension.  What is your favorite book?   Do you like a certain author?   I love to read. 

Writing Workshop– as a writer you will write stories about things you do.   These are called small moment stories.   Each week we will post a few pieces of  writing from students in our class. 

Math– we will develop fluency with numbers to 20 the first few weeks.   You will learn about problem solving and multiple ways to solve problems.  You will add and subtract.  Later we will move to larger numbers to 100.   What are you learning in math?   Can you give us a problem to solve?

Mrs. Todd

Summer Holidays

Where have you been over your  break?   Tell us about a special place you’ve gone.   We would like to hear from students /teachers from different parts of the world.

  •  What did you do there?  
  • How many miles did you travel? 
  •  Did you travel by boat, car, bicycle, airplane or another way? 
  •  Was the weather different there?  
  •  How about the people?
  •  Was it in the United States, Australia, New Zealand, England, Canada, Spain, South America, Europe, Asia?
  •  What makes this place unique? 
  •  Can you persuade us that we should go to this place and if so why?
  •  If you have a picture we would love seeing it as well as hearing about it.   

 We would like to see how many different places people have been during June, July and August which is our summer break in North Carolina.

Horses

Children at Barton went to a racetrack and here are the pictures of a few of our horses I promised.   My grandsons Mason and Hayden enjoy petting them.   Some of the family rides the bigger horses at times.   These are in Virginia at a family farm that we have and we raise them.  A retired man feeds and watches over them during the week and then my husband and different members of the family see them on weekends.Last weekend we were there for a family reunion.

Pictures of Learning

We learned many things this year.  One was working cooperatively in groups.   We worked on projects.   We had book clubs where we discussed books we read.   We interviewed the principal and curriculum coordinator  shown on our first blog. 

  http://kidblog.org/GoingGlobal/feed

We loved using our interactive white board.  We read and wrote stories, poems and non-fiction books about a topic. 

We discover new things and worked really hard together.

We wrote Wonder poems.  Some of these you can research to find the answer, some come from the heart and some do not have answers.    See if you can write one… back to us  All you need to do is wonder about things then write it down like a poem.   It doesn’t have to rhyme.  It can be as many as you want to do.

I wonder why the sky is blue?

I wonder why my dog died?

I wonder what it’s like in space?

I wonder what made my friend mad at me?

You and your friends can write one wonder question and put them together to make a group poem.   Watch us at work doing this.

http://animoto.com/play/PwT4pAga3n222qXyJxdlWA

Second Grade Ends- We Say Goodbye

We are on break now.   Mrs. Todd will keep up with your posting and make comments until new students come on August 25th.  We bet her new students will love the blogging and all the fun things just like we did.   It was the best time of day when we got to read blogs from our friends across the globe.   Then we’d tell Mrs. Todd what to respond back and she’d type what we said.  This is our Thank you for teaching us about so many different things.   We will miss you.  Watch some things we were doing the last week of school.   We loved trying the hand games.

http://animoto.com/play/IY0RryCjcdKN2oViwFsdvA

End of our School Year

Last day school 2011 013  We are leaving for the summer.   Kanga and Roo will stay with Mrs. Todd.  They might visit with her grandsons Mason and Hayden.   Rodney the Roadrunner visits with us before we leave. 

Some of us left early the last day.   The rest of us stayed until 2:00.  We are looking forward to our summer traveling to the beach and mountains.   Some of us will visit other states.  Some plan on cruises.  Some will go to their local pools while others go to waterparks and Carowinds (an amusement park).   We all have homework which is to read each day.   Some plan on writing journals of their daily activities. 

Mrs. Todd will continue to check in to see what each of you are doing.   Some of us will be reading the blog to see new post and comments.

Native Plants by Lauren

North America has extreme climate from Arctic to tropical.  There is a variety of plant life in the mountains, plains, deserts and swamps.   The forest are made of fir trees, pine trees, spruce and broad leaf such as oak, elm, maple, hickory, walnut, ash, and birch. Magnolia in the south and palms /tropical trees in Hawaii and Everglades in Florida.  There are grasses in the east United States (tall grass prairie and western US- short grasses.   20,000 species of flowers-  Goldenrod most widespread all states except Hawaii.  East has wildflowers.   Desert Plants in Arizona, California, Nevada and Utah-  Yuccas, sagebrush, cacti.

Hula Hooping Challenge

 

Students in room 117 at Rocky River were so excited over the hula hoop challenge that Hawes Community Primary School (UK)  had on their blog  that they got really  busy practicing to see if they could do more than one.   Some were fast and some were slower.   We tried to decide which technique worked best.   Which hula hoops work best? Does it matter the height of the person doing it?   Where you hold your arms –Does that make a difference?   Does a large hula hoop work best or a smaller one?   Does a heavier work better than a small one.   They worked and finally we had one student that did 19 for a short period of time.   We then invited the principal and assistant principal in to see what we were learning and to give it a try.   Everyone had fun with this challenge.  We hope you enjoy our movie and see the fun we had.

http://animoto.com/play/AiUgm8Zx60JudK04sM1zMQ

Hula Hooping– We are Practicing

Roadrunners prepare to meet the challenge of how many hula hoops we can use at one time.   What do you think we can do?  Will we beat their record?   Can you do more than 2?   How about 15?  Does it matter what size they are?   Are big ones better?   Perhaps it’s smaller ones.   We are going to find out in the next few days.  Does it matter how old your are or what height you are?     Check back to see what we discover.

Can anyone set on your bottom and jump rope?   We challenge you to see if you can!  I know many of you call it skip rope.

Temperature and Weather–What’s It Like Where You Are?

Roadrunners found it to be a very hot day today.  This week’s weather is hot with a 20% chance of rain on Wednesday and Thursday.

Tomorrow’s high is forecast to be 97 degrees fahrenheit.   70 degrees at night.  Later in the week the high is for 92 degrees and a possible low of 68.  It isn’t summer yet.  Not until later in June.   It is still spring but it’s hot and very humid.

What’s it like where you live?

Playground and Gym–What kind of games do you play?

 Our playgrounds and gym.   We have three playgrounds with equipment to climb and slide on. What kind of games do you play at your school?  We are interested in learning some new games if any one has some they enjoy.    We have jump ropes, frisbees and balls for the field.    We also have a  bright colored gym where we have gym once every sixth day with the PE teacher.UCPS - Rocky River Elementary