Gingerbread Day!

Happy Holidays!

I would like to wish all our families a safe and happy holiday season! Students are excited about Gingerbread Day, as well as getting out for the winter break! They are amazed that this is our last week of school in 2011! Wow! This has been quite a year for our county, but we are still going strong.

Be sure to "chase the boredom" next week with several activities your child can do online.

Top 10 Internet Boredom Busters:
1. Our portaportal website! (also linked from our class website). This has a plethora of websites that students can explore and have fun!

2. Create Your Own Snowflake. This is a very cool website and you can send a message to the world with your snowflake! You can also search who has made snowflakes and where they're from!

3. Raz Kids! (linked from the school homepage). Don't forget: cyouela to access our class!

4. The Electric Company! Watch videos, play games, and keep your reading skills sharp!

5. Brain Pop Jr/Brain Pop: Great websites to watch and learn! Don't forget: mnes (login), and fox (password).

6. Production Videos: These cool videos are what we've watched the past couple weeks with Economics. We've learned how balls, fortune cookies, sneakers, and more are made!

7. National Geographic Kids: a great animal site to explore (watch videos, play games, and learn!)

8. Wordle: create word clouds (we did this with our names!)

9. Class Wiki Site: Review what we've learned, get a "sneak peek" on what we're going to cover!

10. Bob Science: Great experiments to try (with a parent's help!)

Students Need Your Help!

I hope you are having a wonderful fall! I am busy finishing up the first half of the school year (time flies!), and there are not a lot of extra resources lying around for us teachers for the second half of the year! So what I've done is created a classroom project request on a 501(c)3 charity website called DonorsChoose.org.

I'm writing to ask for any donations possible for my students - no matter the size, it will help my kids. This week only, any donation you make to my project will be doubled! If you know anyone that is passionate about education, please pass this along. Your tax-deductible donation will have a direct impact on at least 30 students (and many more in the future), and you'll hear back from our class about your impact on our learning!

To learn more or donate:

1. Visit my Teacher Page, http://www.donorschoose.org/youel
2. Choose one of my projects, enter the amount of your donation, and click "Give"
3. During check-out, enter the word SPARK where it says "I have a gift or match code" field, and your donation will be matched dollar for dollar.

The SPARK match code will double your donation until the end of the day on Monday, December 12th. So exciting!

Feel free to send me any questions. I appreciate your support more than words can say! As do my students!

Happy Holidays!

The (short) Week of November 9th

For a short week, we sure crammed a lot of activities into it! The kids had a FABULOUS experience with our Jamestown Outreach visitor! While our class was split into the other presentations, each student came back excited and pumped up about learning! What a great experience for such a small price! Pictures will be forthcoming on our Jamestown "in house" field trip. Be sure to check back early next week!

We also had our first monthly book exchange. The students eyes were wide when they looked at all the choices they had for "new" books. Many were still surprised that these were their books to keep at home. We're really looking forward to the next book exchange, which will be on Tuesday, December 6th.

On Friday, we celebrated the number "11" since the date was 11/11/11. We also celebrated Veteran's Day, and while we did run out of time, we are going to be writing our veterans and soldiers letters of support on Monday. The website, "A Million Thanks," provides an address that you can send letters and pictures to, and they distribute these to the soldiers and veterans around the world. If you know of a soldier you would like us to write, please share their address! Students were surprised at the sacrifice our soldiers make for us and have a new respect for why we celebrate Veteran's Day.

One of our biggest surprises this week came with a special visitor. Our latest Donor's Choose project, "Getting Our Hands a Little Dirty," which will give us much needed science materials, was funded by the Horace Mann Company. The local representative for our area came to our classroom, complete with a "congratulations" balloon to announce we were the weekly winners of a nationwide contest! The students are so excited! It was a great way to make a personal connection to one of our donors! Please check out the link to the right to visit our Donor's Choose site!

Week of October 31st

Wow! A little bit of a crazy week in our room, with Halloween falling on a Monday, but we made it! Students had fun this week learning out Eastern Woodland Indians, and are really looking forward to our Jamestown Outreach on the 11th, where they'll explore more out the Powhatan Indians of Virginia.
Our picture this week is from our Book Character Day on Monday. Students had a great time dressing up and sharing who they were!
While this next week is a short one, with parent conferences and Election Day, we plan on focusing on the number "11" with the historic date of 11/11/11 falling on Friday, as well as start our new unit in Math on number sense. We'll also be exploring our next region of Natives with the Plains, focusing on the Lakota Sioux. Looking forward to a great week! :)

Week of October 24th

We wanted to share with you some of the exciting things we've been doing the past several weeks. Students have been working hard in the classroom and it has been showing!

In the hallway, we are displaying our "verb" spiders and our "synonym shirts." Students used the Internet website www.wordle.net to create a "synonym" page with their name and what they like!

Also included in our photos are the students checking out our brand new atlases! These were delivered today, thanks to a PTA grant we were given to help supplement our studies of maps and other History units.

Our other picture shows our newest acquisition in our room - the SMART table! This is an interactive tool that students can use to play games and learn new things. As you can see, more than one person can move objects around as they sort, discover, and learn how to do new things! This particular program was helping us review our shapes, both 2D and 3D, count the faces, and find everyday objects that match the shapes.

Read for the Record!

We celebrated Thursday with "Read for the Record", helping set a world record of reading the book, Llama, Llama, Red Pajamas. Students started the day with an assembly about how even reading fiction books can lead us to new adventures and knowledge about topics! I have included a photo of our llama time in the afternoon!

Mystery Readers!

On Thursday, students were surprised by two mystery readers - Louisa Lions football players! They read the class 2 stories, discussed football, and talked with the students about sports. It was a great time!

A Wonderful Chance to Help Out Our Classroom!

Once again, Sonic restaurants are sponsoring "Limeades for Learning." What this means for our classroom is that with every vote, our Donors Choose projects (currently for math supplies) gets us one step closer to getting funded - and all you have to do is vote!
Click the link to the side of our blog to visit the website, search "Louisa" and you will see our project! You can vote once per email address per day. Be sure to visit each day to vote and we're one step closer to getting funded! Last year, our class was funded for three projects through this wonderful opportunity! Please help us out this year! :)

What a fantastic group!

I am so proud of our class and their response to our event yesterday! They stayed calm and really followed directions during and after the earthquake. We were in the middle of our reading group time when the rumbling began. While I know we will all miss each other until we are once again in school, I hope that everyone will stay safe and be ready to go once we are back in school. Many of our students had questions about why and how the earthquake happened. I have created a page on our main wiki called "earthquakes " to help answer any questions as well as resources for teachers and parents to address any questions or fears. I will be adding resources as I find them. Thank you for your support.

I hope to go to our classroom on Thursday and clean up and gather together student belongings. The school will let you know when you can
pick up things but know that it is okay if you would like to leave backpacks, lunchboxes, and folders/agendas until we return!

First Week

We had a great first week of second grade! The kids are settling into a routine and we have already begun reading groups! We will be testing reading levels with the PALS test on August 31, but until then, students are enjoying meeting in groups and reading stories and working on word-building. Please make sure to encourage your child to read at home!

With the coming week, students will have a homework packet that will be due on Friday. This will come home in the Homework Folder on Monday. Thank you for all you do for your child! I have also included on our blog a video from one of our "Math Workshop" activities. The kids were really enjoying it!

Welcome Back! :)

I am so excited about the start of a new school year! While getting up early proved a little hard this morning (not to mention on my 10 yr old son and 4 yr old daughter!), it's great to see old and new colleagues and anticipate meeting my new class!

A little bit about myself: I was born in Richmond, Virginia, but raised in Winchester. I attended Longwood College (later receiving a master's degree when it became Longwood University!) and this will be my 14th year in Louisa County! I have taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades here in Louisa, and previously taught 6th and 8th grades elsewhere. I have two children, Jack and Maggie, who will be in fifth and Kindergarten this year. Exciting things are happening in our house as we anticipate the new school year, as I am sure they are in yours!

Open House is this Thursday! Feel free to bring in supplies and school items to drop off. Hope to meet you in person soon! :)

Field Day!!!

Butterflies

Our class had a great time raising caterpillars into Painted Lady butterflies! This week, we released our newly hatched butterflies and had a great time doing so! Please enjoy this video of our class releasing our new friends! :)

Spring Celebrations!

We had a great time today with our Egg Hunt! Below are pictures of student searching for the eggs with their names on them! A big thank you to Mrs. Dwyer who helped hide the eggs for us this morning!

Our Scientists "Discover" Fossils!

Our classroom "scientists" created fossils on Wednesday, let them dry out overnight, and examined them on Thursday. We created fossils from "class made" play dough and sea shells. Then, on Thursday, we examined our creations and discussed why fossils would be important to a habitat (so we can study what it was like long ago). Students were amazed to discover that actual shell fossils had been discovered in the Blue Ridge Mountains, letting scientists know that once, long long ago, our mountains had been covered by water! We had a great time creating them and, if you'd like to create your own fossils at home, below is the recipe:

"Homemade Play Dough"
2 cups of flour
1 cup of salt
1 tbsp oil (can be cooking oil or baby oil)
1/2 cup of water
variety of sea shells, leaves, etc. to create a fossil

*Mix all ingredients in a gallon zip lock baggie, kneading together the ingredients. Once ingredients are mixed, add more water, slowly, to create the dough.

*Once ingredients are kneaded to form a dough, we used paper cups, cut in half, to put our dough in (or you can roll it out on wax paper, as well). Students pressed shells into the dough to make an impression. (If your dough is too "sticky", add some flour at the top before pressing the shell into the dough).

*Let the dough dry overnight to create your fossil! :)

Great Way to Get Thing for our Classroom!

As you know, our classroom is supported by Donors Choose and all the great people who make donations towards projects we post! Bing is sponsoring an easy way for you to donate $5 from them towards a project of your choice! If you go the following Bing Education link, fill in your email address and state that you will make Bing your homepage, they will send you a code worth $5 towards a Donors Choose project! If you type in "youel" in the project search, our projects will come up.

Please consider donating towards our projects! Right now, we have two projects posted. One is for a personal laminator for our classroom so that we can laminate projects and other items to display in our room. The other project is for keyboards where we can practice our keyboarding skills as well as take AR quizzes and use them for typing writing projects!

Thanks so much for all you do to support your child's education! :)