Banana Bingo Celebration: Show and Tell Day

A few weeks ago the students earned a Banana Bingo and voted to celebrate with a Show and Tell Day.  All the students were able to bring in a favorite toy to share with the class.  They loved seeing each other's toys and taking a little bit of time to play with their toys together.

MaKenna's Lasagna and New Items in our Classroom

Last week the school cooks served a version of MaKenna's lasagna.  It is always exciting for the 2nd graders to hear about their recipes being used, and MaKenna was especially excited!

We've also made a few purchases with our cookbook money in the last few weeks.  The students had decided upon pencils for something that we need.  Each student was able to get 9 new pencils with our purchase.  They requested a new reading pillow for a classroom want.  I found this cool tepee that I thought would be perfect for us as a new reading spot, and the students love it!  The remainder of our money has been set aside for 2 additional purposes, to donate to Judson Bell, and to purchase a few new books for our classroom.

The Best or Worst Pet Opinion Writing

We started our opinion writing unit and have been practicing our skills by writing about pets.  We read a few books and discussed the students' opinions on what kind of pet these animals would make. The students had to choose an animal and state their opinions about whether it would be a great pet or a terrible pet!  We organized our ideas on a bubble graphic organizer.  We used our opinions as our topic sentences and added supporting details to the bubbles to create 2 paragraphs.  The students urged their readers to definitely get that pet or never get that pet in their concluding sentence.  The students had some very cute and heartfelt details to support their topics!

Cora's Favorite Popcorn Snack

One of our 2nd graders celebrated her half birthday on Friday, and she brought in "Cora's Favorite Popcorn Snack" from our 2nd grade cookbook that she made the night before.  The class loved this snack! 

Government Unit

We finished up our final social studies unit on government this week.  We learned about why the original 13 colonies wanted independence from British rule, and how this lead to the Revolutionary War.  We learned about the importance of the Constitution that was established during this time.  As a class, we wrote our own 2nd Grade Constitution stating the rules that we should use to work and play together fairly.

We also learned about how our government officials are chosen through a process of voting.  In order to practice this in our classroom, the students chose a classroom job that they wanted to "run" for.  A voting ballot was typed up, and the students cast their votes for each "office."

Our newly elected "officials" will carry out their jobs this upcoming week.

Final Cookbook Sales

We wrapped up our cookbook sales right before Christmas break.  Once we were all back to school we discussed our total sales, profit, amount to be paid back to the school for our supplies, and we started brainstorming how to spend the rest of our money. 

We sold a total of 201 cookbooks which was incredible to us!  Thank you to everyone who purchased cookbooks and supported our economics project!  Due to a few very kind donations we made $225.  We also want to thank Doug Baker and Carla Strum for donating paper to help us with this project!

Last week we all sat down together on the rug, counted out our money, and got to our first order of business.  We figured out how much we needed to pay back to the school for our printing costs and supplies.  This total was $72.36.  We divided out this money among our classmates and walked down to Mr. Schultz's office.  The students were excited and nervous to present him with this money.  They did a great job!

Once this was taken care of, the class brainstormed how to spend the remaining money.  We decided how much to put aside to help someone.  The class decided our biggest NEED is more pencils and erasers.  The class WANTS a larger pillow as an additional reading spot and a few new books.  The next step is to start looking into prices of these items.  Thank you again to everyone who supported this project.  This has been a great learning project for us in 2nd grade!