Merry Christmas!

 Thanks to the amazing teachers on The Second Grade Teacher's Club and the wonderful Gingerbread Man Exchange my students had a blast! We marked all the gingerbreads we received on the US map and then decided to learn more about our state's facts such as our state bug (Honeybee) and our state shell (yes we have one).

Spur of the moment lessons

Have you ever had one of those days when you throw out your plans and do something completely spur of the moment? On Friday I had 8 students absent out of 26 so I decided to get the laptops out.  I asked the students to just type a story about a snow day. The students love to just type without worrying about following their prewritten pieces. The only direction I gave them was to include characters, setting, and a beginning, middle, and end. They used the program Canvastic so that when they were done typing they could just work on their illustrations. If you are unfamiliar with Canvastic, this program is a combination of writing and painting. Their stories came out awesome; lots of adventures! One of my developing writers created such a fabulous story that I was smiling all day with pride. 

Notice all the empty seats

Wish more days could work out like this. :)