Finally Some Photos!!!!

It seems that I promised a life time ago to post some photos of our word work activities. I finally managed to remember to bring my camera home from work to download photos.

Last week was the first full week where they had to use the tic-tac-toe word work sheets. Since we missed one day of Daily 5, I let them only do 2 jobs on the board instead of 3. Every day at the start of Daily 5 I did my little spiel about how they needed to go to word work and get two jobs done. Even with me telling them EVERY single day to get the jobs done or they wouldn't get choosing time on Friday, I still had 15 students who had not completed their work. Some of them had spent over an hour at word work during the week and gotten NOTHING done!!! Not even one job or even half of a job done! Nada! Zippo! How is that even possible?

Ohmigoodness, I am convinced that the majority of the class just heard blah, blah, blah, word work, blah, blah blah!!!!!  I could have just torn my hair out and screamed when I was marking the Daily 5 books. I mean, what were they doing all week?!?!

The shock on their faces Friday morning when they realized that I was dead serious about taking away their choosing time was priceless. And the speed at which some of them started doing their word work this week was pretty funny, too! My fingers are crossed that I will not have to take away any choosing this Friday.

So, what does word work look like these days? Well we are doing jobs that require specific words using our weekly words (this week they are all with short vowel e). The tic-tac-toe sheet looks like this:

The words on this one are the more difficult level words.

Short vowel e at the beginning or inside words.

Here is a sampling of the work sheet options:

Rainbow  Writing

Clipboard Cruising

Shopping for Words

Stamp A Word

Boggle

This week we will be learning how to do Super Sentences and Magnet Words. Students will then be able to make a tic-tac-toe in three different directions.

In other subject areas, today the grade 2's started their interviews for Social Studies. One of our learning outcomes is to learn about the roles and responsibilities of people who work in our school. To that end the grade 2's have been in project teams for a week preparing questions to ask in their interviews. Today 3 teams did interviews. We had interviews with one of our kindergarten teachers, the principal and the vice-principal. Everyone did an awesome job! I am videoing the interviews so that the class can watch themselves later. I was so proud of how they all conducted themselves while our guests were visiting.

We did some really fun art today around the story Snowmen At Night by Caralyn Buehner.

We did pictures of snowmen doing different activities at night using oil pastels then we wrote about what they were doing. They turned out great! The imaginations in our class are pretty stellar. We had snowmen golfing, racing cars, playing wii, skating and more. I will upload photos soon but, in the meantime, I am going to do a bulletin board beside the office to show them off.

Anywho, that is it for now. I am off to eat some dinner and scour pinterest for more ideas. I swear it is more addictive than caffeine!

Ms. Hughes