SNOW DAY!!!

I realize that the thermometer does not agree with the title of this post, but we had SNOW DAY today! (Tulsa ISD: You are no the only one who gets to play when it snows!)

Hmmm. It is a little warm in central Texas, but today is Snow Day in Mrs. O's room. Let the celebration begin!
LA is our Superstar Student of the week. He did a great job presenting his poster. Please come by and see it!
Next, we had our January Reading Celebration. And did we have something to celebrate: we read for a total of 23,899 minutes (which is 398 hours or 17 days). This is our all-time record in monthly reading totals. No wonder our Reading scores are soaring.

CD was our top reader this month. He read for over 3,000 minutes!
ER, IP and EM all read for over 2,000 minutes!
EKM, OC, BK, EJ and JA all read for over 1,000 minutes! We all got to choose a prize and Mrs. O gave us all a copy of the newest Flat Stanley book.

Way to read, Bumblebees!
We read two books about Snow Days. One was written in poetic free form. The lines did not rhyme and the sentences were not complete, but the poem made us understand how Snow Days felt, smelled, tasted, sounded and looked. We sat dawn to write a similar poem in 12 minutes.
We loved the freedom of this type of poem and produced some amazing poetry for our Poetry Slam. We can express a Snow Day in a very poetic form!
We answered questions about the month of January and we completed a Frosty Word Search.
We cut snowflakes, making sure that they had six sides and were symmetrical. (And no two were alike!) We wrote a "How To"on creating snowflakes.
We played "Roll-a-Snowman". Each number earned a different part of a snowman.

We told Snowman jokes, sand Snow songs and made Snow rhymes.

Then we "bundled up" for recess. It was a chilly 80 degrees.
We returned to watch an old-school VHS on Raymond Briggs' "The Snowman". It shows a cartoon adventure of a boy and his snowman, but there is no talking. We had to make up the story in our heads.
I think we really enjoyed it...
Mrs. O treated us to hot chocolate and marshmallows while we colored snow-themed book marks. (We had a big malfunction with our commercial coffee/hot chocolate maker. May it rest in peace.)

We got to sing about our favorite Snowman: Frosty! We watched a short video about him, too. We tweeted about our day on twitter @obumblebee.

We had a wonderful Snow Day...Texas style.

Fantastic Friday

Mrs. O typed and printed our stories. We had to decide where natural breaks came in the plot.
When we added illustrations, we could only draw pictures that showed what happened with the words on that page. This is harder to do than you would think, because we already know our entire story and want to add details that the reader does not know yet! We appreciate illustrators of picture books much more now.
In our "Time for Kids", we had a wonderful lesson on inventions. We decided that inventions are a LOT like the plot of the story we just wrote: you have a problem and you find the solution. Inventions solve a problem or a need to make life easier, more fun and more efficient.
We filled out a chart on our 3 favorite inventions in the article, then we began work on drawing an invention of our own!
In Science, we came up with a class list of natural bodies of water and manmade bodies of water. We decided that some could be on both lists, like dams and ponds.
OH, LOOK: VISITORS! My sister and her husband were in the neighborhood and stopped by to see our second grade classroom for the first time. (My sister is the one who buys the dogs that are the prizes for our "Dog-Gone" Good Readers contest in February...)(...and she will be really pleased to see that the picture I took of her shows her eyes half opened.)
We did a benchmark speed drill on addition and subtraction facts to see if our "SumDog" math homework is improving our mastery of these facts. The second grade teachers will compare facts in a few weeks.
We ended our day with a visit from the counselor who talked to us about career paths. And a good time was had by all.

Don't forget: this weekend is the last time to earn minutes for the January Reading Contest. We will have the reading celebration on Monday.

Salt water, Fresh water and Cooking Roosters

We are in a unit of earth science. Today we discussed the difference between fresh water and salt water. We looked at a huge world map and noticed that there is a LOT of water on the planet Earth! What we saw on this map (or on a globe) is mostly made up of oceans. Oceans are salt water. Lakes, ponds, rivers, streams and creeks are fresh water. (Even though we discovered most ponds are not very fresh because no water flows in or out of them!)

We watched a BrainPop Jr. on the differences between fresh water and salt water. We used our document camera to come up with a class list of these two different kinds of water. We all made a list in our Science Journal of fresh water/salt water sources.
Wow! We came up with some interesting facts about these two different types of water.
Look at this pie chart. The chart on the left shows the amount of salt water on the Earth. The chart on the right shows the amount of fresh water on the Earth. WOW! We had really better take care of our fresh water so we will have enough to go around. (Did you know there is a garbage heap the size of Texas in the middle of the ocean? We need to keep it clean, too.)
Our world is a magic place full of special shoes and socks. (This was taken on our walk to our favorite place to visit on Thursdays: the library!)
Ms. G had a wonderful lesson on "voice" in writing. The book she used was "Cook-a-doodle-doo!" by sisters Janet Stevens and Susan Stevens Crummel. ( NEWS ALERT: Susan Stevens Crummel will probably be our visiting author this spring! AND.....Janet Stevens went to our school when she was in second grade!)
We listened carefully and gave different "voice" to the way the words could have been written. Thank you, Ms. G for a wonderful library period. You are a great asset to our school and our district. What would we do without school librarians? We hope we will never have to find out.

Spelling test tomorrow. :)

Wordless Wednesday

Presidential Scholars

Last year in first grade, we memorized a song that helped us learn the presidents of the United States. Mrs. O pulled it out to see how many of the presidents we remembered.

First, we got in groups to make a list of presidents we remembered.
We all contributed, but one person was a scribe and wrote the names down.
We worked really hard to name as many as we could in 7 minutes!
The results? The groups came up with 15, 16, 12 and 19 names in their presidential lists!
Mrs. O pulled out our chart from last year and we sang it a few times to kind of remind us of the order. She told us we would be concentrating on two presidents today. These president's birthdays are celebrated in February on President's Day. We underlined them in red: Washington and Lincoln.
We went to www.whitehouse.gov/history/presidents to watch a slide show of the presidents pictures. We read their names and the dates they served.
Next, we went to BrainPop Jr. to watch very short videos on Washington and Lincoln. We listed carefully for interesting facts.
Everyone tweeted one fact about either Washington or Lincoln. You can read the tweets at twitter.com @obumblebees.
At recess today we missed L. Mrs. O is trying to figure out if she had the wrong date or if something happened to keep him from coming to visit. Here we find E (sporting an MJ t-shirt his parents brought him back from Motown...I mean New Orleans), C , and J (who is the Mummy King.)

At the end of the day, Mrs. R and Mrs. D came to help with garden time.

This group put up bird feeders to help the birds out in the winter.


They had a very special helper today. (We are always glad to have L in our classroom whether he is eating marshmallows or just making us happy.)