Last Day Blues

This year has absolutely flown by!  The end of the year is always bittersweet for me.  I am so proud of my li'l second graders, and ready to see them fly, but I also want to hold on to them.  I truly love what I do, and the kids make me laugh everyday.  We can learn so much from them!

They have been helping me organize and clean.   And I mean enthusiastically!  They get VERY excited about helping and organizing.  I literally handed several of them some tubs, drawers, cupboards, and said "go for it!"  They organized it quicker and better than I could have!  Where else can you find people with such joy and zeal for cleaning?  Second grade, that's where!  If only they were that enthusiastic at home - they already told me that it doesn't happen at home!  

I apologize for them lugging tons of "giveaways" home.  They get SO excited for freebies - it is quite funny!  

As some of you know, I do photography on the side.  I saw this idea on pinterest, and I had to do it with my kiddos.  Each of the kids told me what they wanted to be, and I wrote it down.  I changed their photos to black and white and made a collage in Photoshop.  

I love it because it captures who they are at this moment.  Breleigh couldn't decide - so I wrote all three; because that's Breleigh.  I love their cute dreams, and I want them to know they can achieve anything if they hold on to their enthusiasm for learning.  Here are their individual pics: 

You can go to this dropbox link and download the collage if you'd like.  I will send each parent the link to your child's picture.  collagephoto

Thanks for sharing your children with me.  If there are any words of advice I could give it is this:  Look for the good, and praise it.  Children become what we expect them to be.  If we expect them to be irresponsible, they will be irresponsible.  So let's expect the best from them, and encourage them to find their gifts.  They're worth it.

Have a great summer!  

A review of the past months

Thank you to everyone who came to Author's Tea yesterday!  It was great to celebrate the kids' growth and progress as writers!  They were shocked to see the difference between their "friendship" books at the beginning of the year and their biographies by the end of the year.

On another note, I totally fell behind on my goal of posting once a month.  Life happens and gets in the way sometimes!  However, I still managed to take lots of pictures.  Enjoy!



Below are pictures from our reading and science unit on nature.  For our science portion, the kids got to create "critters" that would be camouflaged in our environment.  We started by taking a nature walk and observing our environment.  We noted the colors and textures.  Then we came back and created our "critters" to hide in the environment.  After our critters were made, we measured them and named them.  Finally, we "hid" them in the environment to see if Mrs. West's class could find them.  Then we switched and looked for her class's critters.  Hopefully they learned a lot, and had a good time! 

Cinco De Mayo!

We had a wonderful time yesterday celebrating Cinco De Mayo!  Our focus in reading right now is on beliefs and how they impact our lives.  Cinco De Mayo fit right in with learning about other cultures' celebrations.  We did a close read yesterday on an article about Cinco De Mayo and kids highlighted the most important themes.

Thank you soooo much for working so hard and donating all of the wonderful food!  We had burritos, tacos, homemade churros, salsa, 7 layer bean dip, lots of chips, and much more!  We also got to go into the other second grade classrooms and sample their food!  Here are some pics!

Much thanks to Donna Quinton for helping with the mini food court!  She said she could never work at Chipotle, but I disagree!

Here's a photo of the kids getting ready to sell some lemonade! They get to make change, and count all the money after the sale each day.  Real world math!  They got short changed once also, which is a good lesson - someone handed them a nickel instead of a quarter.

Anthony just had to finish his chips and salsa!