End of the Year Theme Days

Hopefully you're like me and have been soaking up every little bit of precious summer! This post is a little late, but I was thinking you could maybe tuck it away for next year. :) Also, feel free to pin any pictures so you can be sure to find them when you go to plan end of the year stuff next year.

At the end of the year, my team and I plan theme days for the last week of school. I love theme days because I find that my students stay engaged in "school stuff" even though summer is so close they can taste it. Speaking of taste... Why yes, we do use a little food to keep up the engagement! Food definitely helps!

Even though we all do the same theme on the same day, we don't all necessarily incorporate the same activities into each day. So here's a peek into what I specifically do in my classroom...

Lazy Day at the Beach... We spend our beach day lounging on towels and reading outside on the field. We also chow down {both teachers and students, ha!} on popsicles. Of course you know with kids they can't just read outside all day, so I created stations back in my classroom to keep them engaged for the rest of our day and still stick to our beach theme. The best part, in my opinion, is that I found beach sounds on YouTube and I played that through our speaker system. The thing with stations is that they can get quite loud, but my rule was we can't be louder than the music. Here is the link to that YouTube video if you want to use beach sounds to add to your beach day excitement. Here is a look at my stations...

Froot Loop Graphing

Beach Puzzles

Summer Bucket List

Sun Craft

Beach Ball Craft

Since each student works at their own pace, I made a packet with printables from my Lazy Day at the Beach unit for them to work on while they waited to move on to the next station.

You can find my Lazy Day at the Beach unit here.

Cool Campout Day... For this theme day, we laid on blankets and read by the glow of the "campfire". We also made s'mores and worked on activities from my Cool Campout Day unit. Again, I found camping sounds on YouTube and it was the perfect background noise for reading. Here is the link to that YouTube video.

You can find my Cool Campout Day unit here.

Friendship Day... Our kiddos spent a good chunk of time signing yearbooks on Friendship Day. We also made Friendship Mix, Friendship Bracelets, and Friendship Necklaces, and worked on activities from my Friendship Day packet.

If you would like my Friendship Day unit you can find that here. The recipe for Friendship Mix, along with the Friendship Bracelet and Friendship Necklace templates, are all in my unit. What I love about this product is that I have included activities that would be perfect for the beginning of the year too! Next year, I will be incorporating the friendship theme into the first week of school. I may even make friendship mix the last day of the first week back as a special treat!

The other two theme days we had were Game Day and Movie Day. On Game Day, students brought in board games, not electronics, from home and took turns playing each others' games. It was so much fun to watch my kiddos playing games that I played as a kid! Movie Day is pretty self explanatory. We save that for the very last day because our kiddos aren't allowed to bring anything with them to school, so we just relax, watch a cute movie, and munch on popcorn {Pre-popped is the way to go!}.

Here is an example of the letter we send out to parents regarding our end of the year theme days...

Feel free to use the wording to help craft your own letter!

I'm off to enjoy this nice summer night! Hopefully I can can stay on top of blogging this summer!!

Oh yeah, all my end of the year units are on sale just in case you want to stock up for next year!!

Volunteer Gifts

I had two amazing room moms this year and I wanted to do a little something to thank them for all of their help. I bought two cups that I found at Michaels, which are the perfect cups for summer lounging by the pool, and filled them with Lifesaver mints. I then created a little tag and attached the tag using curling ribbon {I think that's the official name for that stuff, right!?}.

Cute, simple, and sweet! If you'd like the tag for your volunteer gift, you can find that here.

Font by Cara Carroll

Graphics by Krista Wallden 

Five for Friday

Happy, happy Friday y'all! It's been a hot minute since I've linked up with Doodle Bugs for her Five for Friday linky and I can honestly say I've missed it! 

Here are my five weekly randoms from this past week...

Our life cycle unit is in full swing. This week we planted our flowers, but before we did, I had my kiddos choose which kind of flower they wanted to plant based on which flower they thought would grow the fastest {This idea came from the fabulous Cara Carroll}. They were over the moon excited! We made this anchor chart to document our choices...

Thank goodness our little plants are beginning to sprout because these may just be part of our Mother's Day gifts...Shhh!!...Don't tell! 

Spoiler Alert!!!! The Sunflowers seem to be the flower that grows the fastest. Although, the Marigold isn't far behind. 

Speaking of Mother's Day... My kiddos have been hard at work on their Mother's Day A-Z Book! These little books are just too cute for words! After spending time brainstorming adjectives to describe our moms using each letter of the alphabet, my kids began writing their books. We are almost done! I know I'm way early, but I wanted to make sure everyone was able to take their time on this project!

Everyone has the same last page.

You can check this out in my little shop if you are still in need of a Mother's Day project!

We have also been working on opinion writing. We wrote about if dogs should be inside pets or outside pets. We brainstormed reasons and examples to support each opinion using information from our reading passage for the week. 

Our reading passage came from Julia Lee's comparing and contrasting packet. Can you guess what opinion was the most popular? Dogs belong inside of course!! I'm not biased or anything! Ha!

Yesterday we began our shared research project. We are going to research rabbits together as a class and the kids are going to take our research and write an informational writing piece with it. I am using Hope King's Ultimate Spring Writing and Craft Bundle and I can honestly say I've used every.single.piece of the 209 page packet! It's totally worth purchasing if you don't have a copy already! 

I created these posters to use as a whole group. We started by digging into our schema and coming up with questions to help guide our research. 

This was in one of my little sweeties' schema...

Rabbits have diabetes? I just had to look that one up! Turns out, it is rare for a rabbit to have diabetes. Who knew? Ha!

You can snag these brainstorming pages here. 

{Graphics from Krista Wallden, Fonts by Cara Carroll}

I went to copy our monthly writing journals this week and y'all can you believe it's already May?

You can grab these writing journals for free in my shop!

Our admin threw us a Sweet 16 Ice Cream Party last Tuesday complete with a toppings bar and all. It was too stinkin' fun! Now we are down to 12 days!!

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!!

On the Hunt for The Cash Caper!

Do y'all ever feel like you need a good hook {I mean a reeeeally good hook} to "sell" your kiddos on a lesson? When kids come to second grade they have been taught how to identify and count coins before.   As with most concepts that have been previously introduced in the younger grades, I have some kiddos who get it, some that don't get it, and some kids who fall into every nook and cranny in between when it comes to money. I needed a really good hook to get my kids excited about learning about money, AGAIN! That's how "The Cash Caper" idea came to be. I don't know about you, but my kids love a good mystery! One look at this guy and they.were.hooked.

Once I had sold him to them really good {dramatically, of course} the real fun began! Our second grade money standard doesn't have us learning about identifying and counting coins, but they are expected to solve money word problems. Before we began that, I wanted to know exactly where my kids were with money concepts. I had them complete a coin bubble map to show prior knowledge of each coin.

They wrote prior knowledge in green. After the lesson, they wrote new knowledge in blue and crossed out any misconceptions in red. {BTW… I think it's so cute how hung up they got on the color of each coin. They had to have the EXACT color written down. Ha!} Once I knew my kids could identify the coins, I had them show me what they remembered about counting coins, making a dollar, and showing coin combinations in different ways. Everyone needed a little refresher on these concepts! After a lot of modeling and practice, the kids that continued to struggle were given additional practice activities to work on with me during Guided Math. 

What I love about this pack is that I was able to incorporate adding up to four two-digit numbers {also a second grade standard} into our money unit too! Here is a little snapshot of one of my kiddos building her own pizza and adding up the toppings to find her total…

She even added her numbers using decimals! That makes my teacher heart flutter!

We also practiced a lot of different kinds of word problems involving money and wrote a lot about our mathematical thinking in our money reflection journal each day.

Here's a peek into this unit…

I also included coin manipulatives, both big and small. The small ones can be used by the kids and the large ones can be used as a giant whiteboard manipulative {Just add a magnet to the back!}.

If you're interested in this unit, you can find it here! It's on major sale for the next 24 hours! 

Author's Purpose for Informational Texts

We've been hard at work in second grade learning about author's purpose. At the beginning of the year we learned that author's write to persuade, inform, or to entertain {P.I.E.}. We made this little flip book to help us remember...

If you'd like a copy you can grab that here. On each page we wrote what it means to persuade, inform, or entertain a reader. Next year, I will also write examples and features of texts that are written to persuade, inform, and entertain. 

After a quick review of author's purpose, we began to look closer at one piece of the P.I.E., writing to inform. We talked about how authors write to inform by writing to answer a question, explain a procedure, or describe a topic. 

My fabulous teammate came up with a quick foldable {large piece of construction paper folded into thirds} to use to help our students keep track of why authors write to inform. 

She made hers into a "Informational Text Toolbox". I just told my students it was their guide book. 

We looked at various examples of informational texts throughout the week. Here is what we used for writing to answer a question...

writing to explain a procedure... I also used driving directions from our school to a museum that we went to for our second grade field trip as an example. 

writing to describe a topic...

As I gave my kiddos a preview of the texts, I had them hold one finger in the air if they thought the author wrote the text to answer a question, two fingers if they thought the author wrote to explain a procedure/process, and three fingers if they thought the author wrote the text to describe a topic. We really had some great discussions about what in the text led them to think the author wrote to answer, explain, or describe. I had my kiddos write notes in their foldable. They wrote what it means to answer, explain, and describe, examples of texts, and a few features of the texts that will help us to figure out the author's purpose.

Please excuse the mistake in the top picture. My kiddos actually corrected me. They were all like "Mrs. G., it's not cat to kitten, it's kitten to cat." Ha! Teachers make mistakes too!!

Next week they will go on an "Informational Text Author's Purpose Hunt". Each table group will get a set of books. They will have to explain what the author's purpose was for writing each book and what features from the text helped them to determine the author's purpose. If you want a copy of this you can grab that here. I'm also including a "Authors Purpose Hunt" for P.I.E. if you're not quite to informational text purpose yet. The other thought I had with the hunt was to have my kiddos look around in the Media Center to search for texts, but I simply don't have the time this year to do that. I'm struggling to get everything all in before the end of the school year. Ya feel me?! Only five more weeks! AHH!

{Freebie graphics from Krista Wallden and fonts by Kimberly Geswein and Cara Carroll.}

New Look!

Oh my word! I'm so excited about my super cute new blog design! I first worked with Kassie when she designed our family blog The Story of Our Lives. I absolutely loved it and loved working with her! She is amazingly talented and really works with you to create just the right look! I knew I HAD to have her redesign my teaching blog too! So here it is… what do ya think? 

I figured since I'm so excited to share this new look, I would offer up one of my FAVORITE products for free for a limited time only. By limited, I mean until I go to bed tonight. Ha!

This is one of my favorite products because we seriously use it eve.ry.day. It's a great way for me to get a quick look at what my kiddos are grasping and what they need a little more help with. 

It's free y'all! Head on over to my little shop and grab it! While your there… please leave some sweet feedback and follow my store! I'd also love for you to leave a comment here to tell me what you think about my new blog design! Happy Friday friends!!

A Little Fraction Freebie

Just droppin' in to share a little fraction freebie. In second grade, the CCSS states that students should be able to partition shapes {rectangles and circles} into halves, thirds, and fourths. I whipped up this quick craftivity to give my kiddos another opportunity to reinforce the partitioning concept. Who else thinks partitioning is a difficult word for second graders to understand? They get the splitting or dividing concept, but the word partition leaves my kiddos saying *huh?*. Anyways, I digress, back to the freebie.

So, I had my kids cut out their circle and rectangle and glue one on one side of the construction paper and the other on the other side. They glued the math prompt below their shape and filled in the blanks. After the fact {Dang, I hate when that happens!}, I realized I should have written the math prompt in a way that kids could use the word halves, thirds, or fourths. I'll do it that way next year, but I did include that version of the math prompt in my freebie to y'all! 

Not only did they practice partitioning their shapes, they started to pick up on more advanced fraction skills. I told my kids that if they share their pizza, cake, or whatever, that means they have to give themselves a piece, then write down the names of the other people they would share it with. My kids noticed that if they divided their shape into fourths, they could only share it with three other people because they kept a piece for themselves. So, we then started to talk about how they took one fourth of their food, and they only had three fourths left to give. I love when their observations lead into deeper conversations about whatever concept we are learning about! Love those little smarties of mine!

If you think you can use this in your room, go and grab it here! Happy Saturday friends!