Second Grade Rocks

google, technology

New Year’s Resolutions and Google

January 4, 2017

My kids were able to complete their New Year’s resolution activity in Google Classroom today and they loved it. We still have a lot to learn and baby steps are a must, but for 7 and 8 year olds they are ROCKIN’ this Google Classroom thing. It is so amazing to see them just open it up and get to work. Today I kept the slide show open on my desk and monitored all the projects at once. I felt a bit like a mall cop watching surveillance monitors. It was amazing. I could see immediately if someone had forgotten a period, font was too big, word was misspelled or picture was not on the page and I was able to have the student fix it before they ever exited out or I could call a student over and we could work through a challenge together as they were experiencing it. Not after they have turned it in and I have sent it back and they have totally forgotten what they were trying to do in the first place.

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Google Classroom and New Year’s Resolutions

December 31, 2016

My New Year’s resolution is to use Google Classroom a lot more!!! So I decided to make a collaborative digital book with Google slides for my students where they can share their New Year’s resolutions. If you are interested in trying this project with your students you can click on the picture below and get it for FREE!!!!!! I have made a YouTube tutorial on how to use this product. You can find that {here}.

christmas, letter, Santa, sticky note, writing

Santa Letter Writing

December 22, 2016

Writing can be so hard to teach, at least it is for me! I decided that this year I was going to over haul my writing instruction. I am so tired of kids writing a list and not developing an idea with details. I have tried several approaches to tackling this issue and none have worked for me or my kiddos to the extent I would have liked. And then…. the idea hit me. Boom! STICKY NOTES! Yes, sticky notes. Kids go crazy for sticky notes and …. and…Santa. All I had to do was tie in the two and angels would sing. Okay, angels didn’t sing, but it was AWESOME to watch the blending of these two elements to produce the most perfect letters to Santa. They were thoughtful, polite, kind and detailed. Yes, detailed. My teacher heart was doing a happy dance. I plan to use this technique for future writing lessons!!! I knew I wanted their letters to answer the question if they were naughty or nice and give Santa a reason to support their answer. I wanted the letters to address a need and a reason why they needed that item. Their third sentence would…

christmas, google, technology

Google Classroom Collaborative Project

December 8, 2016

Google Classroom!!!!!!!! I am beginning to really love you! I’m usually pretty techy with these kinds of things, but Google Classroom was very daunting to me. I just could not wrap my mind around the fact that kids could work on an assignment collaboratively and send it to me electronically with the push of a button. I know this makes me sound 80, but its the TRUTH! I’m always up for a challenge and I decided that I was jumping in-ALL IN. I told my kiddos what my vision was and that I anticipated it being challenging but we would work together to figure it out. AND WE DID! When our classroom Christmas tree came off the printer I jumped for joy and then ran to show our tech guru. WE DID IT! The kids are so thrilled, I’m so thrilled, the parents will be so thrilled. This is thrilling to say the least. I’m not going to lie, I made some mistakes but I’m going to share my mistakes with you so that you can either laugh at me or learn from me. Ha ha! 1. I’m sure you are finding out that there is not a lot of…

genius hour

Genius Hour

November 29, 2016

Well I’ve decided to jump into Genius Hour. I keep reading about all these wonderful experiences kiddos are having as they pursue their passion. I have such an inquisitive group of second graders that I just have to give this a whirl. So… whirl we are. I kicked off Genius Hour with this fun video from Kid President. I just love that kid! This was a great video for getting the kids excited and motivated to share their “wonderings.” I gave each student a square of construction paper with their name at the top. I decided to write their name all fancy at the top. By “fancy” I mean with Sharpie. I told them this was their very own Wondering Wall. Which of course elicited many oohs and aaahs even though they had no idea what a Wondering Wall is. I love their excitement. I told them to just hang on because I was about to share something with them that would knock their socks off- colored sticky notes. I know- minds were blown. I gave every student 1 sticky and told them to write 1 “Wondering” on it. They had to start the sentence with “I wonder..”. Once…

google, technology

Google Classroom

November 6, 2016

I am blessed to work in a district that provides 1:1 Chromebooks for primary students. I was pretty nervous at first. I’m an Apple girl all the way and that was definitely my comfort zone. I have slowly become a Google Gal though. My learning curve is steep but I am making progress. I decided to give Google Classroom a whirl. There isn’t a ton of resources available for Google Classroom and primary students so I’m pretty much figuring this out as I go. For my first assignment, I had the kiddos join our Classroom, add it to their bookmark bar and watch a YouTube video on bats. That was enough for a first lesson and they did great!!! I was so shocked and nervous that I forgot to snap some photos. Trust me it was so awesome to watch all those little faces actively learning with technology.

Halloween, science, stem

Halloween Day Fun

November 2, 2016

What to do when Halloween falls on a Monday? That is all sorts of wrong. I really wanted to keep our schedule sorta normal thinking that could possibly tame some of their excitement. I.THOUGHT.WRONG!!!! You would think that spending over 20 years as a classroom teacher I would never make a rookie mistake. Oh Boy did I. I honestly thought Pumpkin Catapults would be a wonderful science activity to occupy their candy/costume craziness. Uh No! Learn from me, people. Nothing should be catapulted on Halloween. But… if you wanted to try this activity on another day, I’m sure it would be lots of fun. I started the activity by showing a couple of pumpkin catapult videos from Youtube. We talked about what a catapult is and what it’s function is. Next, I let the kids group themselves (I know crazy). I told them they had to be in groups of 2, 3, or 4. I gave each group a bucket of materials: rubber bands, popsicle sticks, masking tape, plastic spoons and of course a pumpkin. I chose the candy variety FYI and probably the only right decision I made the entire day. Ha! …

bats, science

We’ve Gone Bat Crazy!

October 25, 2016

Our first order of business during our bat study was to figure out what we already knew about bats. I loved the way Amy Lemons made her schema chart so I gave it a whirl too. You can see my version on the left in the photo below. Next, we generated a ton of questions we had about bats. When I say a ton I mean a ton. Their brains were working overtime. So exciting! We could officially jump into some very serious research now that we knew what we wanted to learn. To start, each of my researchers were given a sentence about bats. They needed to decide if their sentence was a fact or an opinion. We sorted these sentences into the fact and opinion pocket charts. You can see this in the photo above. Next, I gave each kiddo a short paragraph about bats. The passage I used was from Amy Lemons (again). We went through the paragraph together highlighting the facts one color and opinions another color. The kids made the bat craftivity to record one fact about bats and one opinion about bats. I had them write their facts and opinions on stickies…

bats, research, science

The Bat Cave

October 23, 2016

Oh My Word! My kiddos absolutely LOVED our Bat Research Week. I knew they would love learning about bats, but I still wanted to take the opportunity to set the stage to engage these little learners and boy did they love learning in the Bat Cave last week. I covered every possible square inch of table space in my classroom with black tablecloths. I hung the purple lights around my Smartboard. I hung bats from the ceiling (thank you Target $ spot). I bought each student a glow bracelet to use on our first day of learning. I turned off most of the lights when the students entered so that the glow bracelets would really pop. I played bat sounds over the speaker system. The kiddos were absolutely over the moon excited!!!

matter, science

Making Matter Pop!

October 20, 2016

The kids had a blast making Matter Pop today. I was impressed with how much knowledge they brought to the table. My little scientists made me proud. I started by putting the sodas, pop rocks and balloons on the table. I asked the students what we could do with these items. They immediately said to put the balloon over the soda and shake it up to blow up the ballooon. Pretty smart. Let’s be honest, they were dying to shake the soda. We recorded our question and hypothesis on our lab reports and set to work. We used a funnel to fill each balloon with 1 packet of pop rocks. I attached the balloon to each soda. My volunteers were tasked with holding up each balloon so the pop rocks could go slide into the soda. Once the balloons started filling with air the kids were actually screaming (I love that!). We had a wonderful discussion about how the soda and pop rocks are producing the gas to blow up the balloon. Of course they wanted me to shake the sodas to see what would happen. Nobody volunteered for that job. I had to do it in the name of…

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