Welcome 2011!

Today was such an exciting day! Yesterday was J's birthday so he was Today's Helper. He had a LOT of work to get the calendar set up. He had to change the year, month, date, day and season!
We got credit for reading over the break. (Parents: send in your minutes tomorrow if you did not include them in today's agenda. If you didn't keep an official list, make your best estimate and I will post it on your child's chart.) IP read for 1445 minutes. We get a commendation ticket each time we read an hour or more. IP got 24 tickets! It took a lot of strategies to figure out how many hours (multiples of 60) could be made out of 1445 minutes--but we did it!
Everyone had their pictures made in the 2011 glasses...a Bumblebee tradition! Some students wondered how these glasses would look since all the other years in this decade had 2 zeroes together for eye holes. (Example: 2001, 2002 etc.) Good question! They just cut a hole in the number one in the ten's place! We are working on resolutions. When we are done, I will run every one's pictures and resolutions.
Remember that tiny amaryllis? It grew over 12 inches during the break and is about to bloom. Mrs. O thinks it was waiting for our happy faces to open up and blossom!
The bad news? Rain at recess. The good news? Free drawing with our new markers.
We also enjoyed our snacks. (Good news: During recess we work on our WOW laps. We have now run enough laps that every student in our classroom is eligible for Marathon Kids t-shirts! Way to run, Bumblebees!)
Guess what this is? Snowman Multiplication! If you click twice on the picture it will enlarge it, and you will see the number sentences the students composed. After we did 1-5 as a class, the students had to write the facts for the six snowmen in their math journals. Everyone did a wonderful job.
Here they are working diligently. We also did some addition and subtraction timed drills. Our principal is about to send out a memo explaining our campus-wide initiative for math drills (for speed) each evening. Second grade will work on addition facts to 9+9=18 and subtraction facts to 18-9=9.

We took a spelling test over contractions. (We also have to know what words make up the contraction.) We got new crayons and markers. We chose five new books for our book bags and one has to be a chapter book. We wrote in our journals about our wonderful holiday vacation. We can't wait to share them.

Welcome back, everyone! I am excited to see where this semester will take us.