Growing Our Research

Reading and research has definitely sprouted in our classroom. We have selected our topics and have been busily gathering information. What is your child's topic? Is it on this list, or is it something different?

• life cycles of plants
• plant parts: roots, stems, leaves, seeds, flowers
• interesting or unusual plants: cactus, venus flytrap, WOW!
• trees
• plant colors
• photosynthesis (It's what makes a plant a plant you know.)
• sunflowers
• ???
• how seeds are spread

Whatever the topic, I'm sure your child has a bushel of information to share. While we gather this information, we are also thinking about how to publish what we know so others can learn from us. We are working as researchers and thinking like writers. Do we have enough information to publish? When we publish, how can we make it all look like an organized book a reader will be interested in? These are but a few of the questions we are considering as we wrap up our plant unit.

What's that you ask? Are we singing a song about plants too? Why yes we are, thanks for asking. This week we learned and sang along to the Garden Song as performed by John Denver and the Muppets. So, here's to the Garden Song Link; here's to plants; and here's to Seconds!

Bloom and Grow

How do roots grow? How do plants make food? What's the largest and smallest plant? Some questions, huh?

You may have heard through the grapevine that we are researching plants. Each day we take some time to read and write about plants and mix in some experiments along the way. We are working as botanists, scientists, researchers, and writers as we unearth lots of information about plants.

When we return from Thanksgiving break, we will really dig in and form several research groups. The groups will be rooted in investigations around specific plant topics. Within these groups, researchers will cultivate an understanding of their topic and share this knowledge with others. No doubt, cool and informative projects will sprout up over the next couple weeks.

We look forward to our explorations really branching out, as every new discovery is just more food for thought. So here's to plants and here's to Seconds!

Conferences!

Hello Families!

Ms. Muck and I are happily preparing for conferences. If you have not had a chance to sign up for a time slot on Wednesday or Thursday, please jump over to the Woodland homepage and find a day and time that works for you.

These conferences are a time to talk about your child's first few months in second grade. We want the conference to be a conversation about your child. What's going well? What are we working on? What's next? Really, it's a time to share information and think about how we all can support the important work of growing and learning in second grade. If you have questions about the year so far, please feel free to ask them when we meet. If there is something important you think we should know, please share it with us. The more we all know, the more we can all help.

We are looking forward to seeing everyone on Wednesday or Thursday. So here's to a great, home-school partnership and here's to Seconds!

Sing Along With Seconds!

Each morning we begin our day with a song. We try to learn one new song a week. On Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays we sing our new song. When Thursday and Friday arrive, our classroom helpers choose their favorite from an always-growing list of tunes. You can sing along with us at home! Just click the song titles below to be miraculously, or technologically, transported to YouTube, hit play and sing your heart out. Feel free to skip the ads; we do. Here's to the soundtrack of our classroom and here's to Seconds!

If I Only Had a Brain sung by The Scarecrow

Mister Rabbit sung by Pete Seeger

My Favorite Things sung by Julie Andrews

I Won't Grow Up sung by Peter Pan

Three Little Birds sung by Bob Marley

So Many Books, So Little Time

When we write, we are writers. This week we are 100% writers because we are publishing our personal narrative stories. Let me tell you, it's not easy publishing a book.

First, we looked through our writing notebooks and decided which story was worthy of publication. Next we thought about the book's layout: tall or small, illustrations or only text. Once we made these decisions, we set to work on our final copies. Out of respect for our readers, we are paying attention to correctly using capital letters, spacing between words, spelling, and punctuation at the ends of our sentences. Whew it's a lot to pay attention to.

The work in our publishing house this week is going well. We hope to finish our final copies in the next few days because we can't wait to share these stories with families during conferences. So here's to deadlines and published stories. Here's to writing and writers. And here's to Seconds!

Writing About Reading

Shhh. Don't tell Ms. Bolme's Second Grade class, but we are writing them a letter. The letter is about one of our favorite books, Mrs. Chicken and the Hungry Crocodile.

Whenever writers write, they have a purpose. Our purpose is to convince Ms. Bolme and her students how good this book is. We discovered that before we write, we have to do a little planning. Planning is like slowing down our thinking. During our two days of planning, we uncovered some pretty fancy ideas we didn't think about right away. If we would have just started writing and quickly finished the letter, we would have missed writing about the author and the illustrator. Our whole letter would have been about our favorite part, favorite part, favorite part, and another favorite part. Zzzzz. Kind of boring, don't you think? Since we took time to think and plan, we now have a bunch more interesting ideas to include in our letter.

We can't wait to write our letter and send it to Ms. Bolme's room. Sharing books and letters with friends is way cool. So here's to friends; here's to books, and here's to Seconds!

Writing Like Readers

There's a problem. Seriously. Every story we read has had a problem. The problem happened because one or more of the characters wanted something. Getting what we want is rarely easy, so there's the problem.

As readers we have noticed these problems. Today we opened our writer's notebooks for the first time and started thinking about the stories from our lives. Guess what. There were problems:

• dog bites
• cuts
• broken bones
• accidentally left a child at home and drove away (Yes family, you know who you are.)
• fell off a bike
• fell into a lake
• got sick and couldn't go outside
• lost in the store...dun, dun, dahhh

Oh my, the list goes on. Now that we know there's a problem, we will write like authors and think like readers. We will plan our stories, just like authors do, to include characters, settings, and events that tell the story in the best way we know how. It's the way the stories we have read work, and it's the way we are working too. How nutty is this? A problem is a good thing for a writer. Ha. So here's to problems, and here's to Seconds!