We got a special delivery at the beginning of this week from the one and only, Santa Claus!!!   They were in awe by this little delivery even in second grade.  Even my non-believers had that twinkle in their eye.  ;)  Thanks to Cara Carroll for her cute Elf on the Shelf download.   They decided to go with the name Anna in keeping with their Frozen obsession.  I had to talk them out of Bambi and Little Red Riding Hood.  Where they come up with these things, I can't figure out!   The kids got incentive cash for good behavior, so she had to get some, too.  Then, she started making her list for Santa Claus later in the week.  They were pretty worried when the list was gone the next day and they didn't get to see who made the nice list!   We go to school only until about 10:00 next Friday, so we always do our Christmas parties on that abbreviated day.   I have had to miss a lot this year with sickness, so I wanted to make it up to them with a big par...
We have really been drilling place value.  It's so important to have a deep understanding of place value in order to move on to other concepts like double-digit addition and subtraction with regrouping.  We spent about two weeks on tens and ones and another two weeks on hundreds.  We used our EnVision a lot and supplemented with Amy's Playing Around with Place Value resource during whole and small groups.   Last week, I felt it was time to break out The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs .  I have posted about it before, but I wanted to share it again.   This activity took about three days in its entirety.  The first day, we kicked off the lesson with Race to 100.  Anything involving a race always gets them excited! The place value mat is from the Playing Around with Place Value pack.  I like it because it has visuals for the ones, tens, and hundreds.   Each child has a set of place value manipulatives and a number cube.  They roll the number cube.  ...
Hello, friends!  I am finally back after my LONG absence.  I have been wanting to share my weekly plans, but it would have been a picture of me on the couch or in the bed!  I have had mono for the past month and it took me down, y'all!!!  I have never been so thankful for my health!  I went back to work last week, and we are on fall break this week.  We finally got to have our apple week last week, so I wanted to share some of what we did. Here are my visual plans for ELA.  Of course, I over-planned as usual.  I have got to get that under control!! We started our apple unit with a KWL.  Then, we went on to build our background knowledge and vocabulary related to apples.   You can get the free apple vocabulary cards {HERE} . We talked a lot about how labels can help us better understand informative text.  The anchor charts are Cara Carroll inspired. The next picture is one of me being attacked by seven year olds with post-it notes.  I let th...