Puppypalooza!

Finally, the day we have been waiting for all month came: Puppypalooza! We have read all month and recorded our reading minutes. We will use the minutes to...
...rescue dogs from The Puppy Pound! (Thanks to Mrs. O's sister for buying us these stuffed dogs each year!)
We invited all our parents to come by when they dropped us off. We had People Treats, individual books we had written about dogs and a class book called "Who Let the Dogs Out?"
CD's family
ER's family
EJ's dad
EKM's mom
OC's dad

JA's dad
RK's family
EH's family
BK's family
GR's dad
JF's family
EM's mom
LA's mom
CB's dad couldn't come because his sister is home with fever. ER's mom read with CB!
But, wait! There's more! Today was RK's birthday.
EM wore a shirt that went with our "Dog-gone Good Readers" contest.
OC lost a tooth over the weekend.
We traded our reading minutes in for dogs. We read for 14,876 minutes this month! (That's 248 hours or 10 days total! Way to read, Bumblebees! No wonder our DRA levels are shooting sky high!) The readers above read for more than 1,000 minutes in February.
Here is our entire class with their puppies rescued from the pound with reading minutes. We are letting our dogs narrate their own stories. Bet you can't wait to read them!

We Really Did Do Work Today...

RK had two special guests at morning assembly today: her sister and mother. I wonder why they were here?
To see R get her Birthday Book from Mrs. G! (R's birthday is Monday.)
If it's Friday, it must be Treasure Chest Day! Mrs. O pulls tickets from the Commendation Bucket to see who gets to pick a prize first.
There was a lot of energy in the room because we were going to have a special visitor this afternoon. The students asked if they could show their "sweet dance moves". How could a teacher resist that offer?
We went out to recess and found.....L had arrived! He brought cookies and a lot of good wishes!
For math we played "Roll to 100" on 100 charts. We also had a speed contest on SumDog as a class. L had to leave at 2 just as the Counselor arrived to teach her lesson.

DON'T FORGET:

• This is the last weekend to read for minutes in the February Reading Contest. We will be "purchasing" our dogs with our minutes on Monday.
• Puppypalooza will begin at 7:30 am on Monday morning. Please come by and see our dog books and grab a "People Treat".
• Doggy Bags with a snack and word of encouragement are due on Monday.

Have a great weekend!

The Magic of Ordinary Days

Yesterday at pick up time, JM's mom brought me this Bumblebee cookie. It was as good as it looks!
EH lost a tooth! We have lost 19 teeth in our classroom this year.
We are making People Snacks for our Puppypalooza on Monday morning. Stop by when the first bell rings and see our newly published books.
LA is perfecting his joke telling.
Rain during recess didn't rain on our parade. RK and OC made Harry Potter characters at indoor recess. (L to R: Hermione and Voldemort.)
EM drew special pictures for many of her friends.

When life hands you rain at recess; make a sunny time inside!

In Library, Ms. G read us a book on Monarch migration about a butterfly named Hurry.

In Math, we took a test over adding with regrouping. (Learning curve: SHOW YOUR WORK!)

Next week, we will begin subtraction with regrouping.

In Science, we studied water cycles and learned the meanings of evaporation, condensation and precipitation. We talked about ways we could save water, and digressed into a conversation on the wealth of Bill Gates and how much money he has given away for education and children's healthcare (including his crusade to eradicate polio from the world during this generation.) (Your children provide for some very interesting rabbit trails. Life is good in the second grade.)

Assembly in the morning: meet in the cafeteria.

Wednesday Wonders

C came in with a book by "Weird Al" Yankovic that we talked about in class recently. (His mother got it for him because of his good grades!) In the book, Al talks about all the different professions he'd like to try out. Thanks for sharing this with us, C!
Secret Project: We are assembling a special treat for parents who visit our "Puppypalooza" on Monday morning from 7:30-7:50 am. We will have a book release for our newly published dog books, and we will have a tour of puppies in the Puppy Pound that can be purchased with reading minutes on Monday.
Today we wrote Acrostic Poems using our first names, we recorded our observations on "Sarah, Plain and Tall" in our Reading Response notebooks, and we worked on our Scientific Spelling Rule for the week. (The Doubling Rule: If a word ends with a vowel/consonant combination, you double the final consonant before adding -ing or -ed. ) Examples: hop becomes hopping and hopped. Jump has a vcc, so you would not double the final consonant.
Spanish! We reviewed days of the week and months in Spanish.
We played "Lotteria!" instead of Bingo. We identified words in Spanish.

Math drills for homework tonight.

We are still taking up Box Tops for Education.

Please return signed conference forms.

Read! Your minutes will be totaled on Monday for the month of February. You will use them to "buy" dogs from the Puppy Pound.

Welcome Back From a Four Day Weekend!

EK is our Superstar Student today. (Our last one! Everyone has had a turn now.) She did a great job of presenting her board. Come by and see it if you can.
We finished reading "Sarah, Plain and Tall" by Patricia MacLachlan. We watched a small portion of the video to compare and contrast differences between the book and the movie. (The students asked me to check if this movie is on Netflix so they could finish it. It is NOT on Netflix, but it IS on Amazon. There are two more movies in the series: "Skylark" and "Winter's End". These are Hallmark Hall of Fame performances and are well worth watching. The same characters are in all 3 movies that span a period of about 15 years.)
EPIC MICKEY!!!
Don't forget the Silent Auction is coming up on March 5.
The freeze took a toll on our cactus garden.
The district groundsmen are guilty of crepe murder on our crepe myrtles.
POCKET DAY! Today, we were determined that everyone would come up with the correct answer for total pockets.
Because we have learned our addition facts AND because we are adding with regrouping, everyone was able to get the correct answer! WAY TO GO, BUMBLEBEES!
This crew got the answer correct on the first try and got a pirate pencil as a reward. Arrgghh!
Garden Day! Mrs. R and her mother, Mrs. D (in from Michigan) helped a crew clean up the garden and pick some vegetables which were fed to the school rabbit.

We only have one student out sick today, so maybe the illnesses have run their course through our room.

Be sure and read information in the agenda carefully...there are a lot of things coming up in the next week!

Thank You, Mrs. Backhaus

Today, we honored Sue Backhaus with a special assembly. She has retired after 28 years in the classroom.

Our class wrote and sang a song for her. It was to the tune of "New York, New York".
Start spreading the news

Retiring today:

B-A-C-K-HA-US

That spells: Backhaus.
She's taught very hard

For 20 plus years
B-A-C-K-HA-US

That spells Backhaus.
She's taught us ABCs

And our 123s so well.
She's taught us sounding out words

She has stories to tell!
She's taught how to rhyme

Count by fives and tens
She's taught us to share and get along

With all our friends!
She's helped us all these years,
Let's not have any tears:
Happy Retirement,
Mrs. Backhaus!!!!
Here are all the students at our school who have had Mrs. Backhaus. We did the math and decided she has taught over 700 students in her years in the classroom.
We honored her one last time by singing the school song for her.

Maybe we should change the words for one day to be:

"We have a teacher like no other place,

She came each day with a smiling face.

She was so special at our school,

She always practiced The Golden Rule...."
Thank you for changes the lives of a generation, Mrs. Backhaus. We are honored to call you teacher and friend.