Back to School Gift

In the past I have given my students smarties on the first day of school with a little note on them.  See them here.  I decided to make it a little more exciting this year and add a pencil as well since I was able to buy 30 for $2.50 at Walmart. 

The note now says: 

I am so glad to have such a "sharp" student in my class.  What a "smartie" you are!  Welcome to second grade.  We are going to have a great year!
Love,
Miss Paul

Here is a picture:

 

I am moving apartments so I have spent the past few days working on packing, but I will be back to my classroom on Friday to add some finishing touches before I go back to work on Monday.  Classroom pictures will be up soon!

Love Notes Scrapbook

This year I got lots of love notes from my students and lots of pictures as well. Throughout the year I would either hang them up behind my computer or put them in a file folder and save them.  At the end of the year the file folder was bulging.  I decided that I would make a scrapbook of the love notes I received.  It will be great to look back through it on those rough teaching days or long after I have stopped teaching.  Someday way in the future I bet my kids will also get a kick out of reading the notes that my students wrote to me when I was a teacher. 

I got a 12 x 12 scrapbook. It has a spot for a picture in the front so I put a picture of my class in it.  I also bought a pack of 12 x 12 paper.  Then I spread out all my love notes and got to work putting them on pages.  I cut up some of the pictures and just used pieces of them here or there as I needed something to fill a certain space. 

Putting this together was a fun summer project that only took about a day!  I loved my kiddos this past year and I am so happy that I now have their love notes all together in a cute scrapbook that I will enjoy looking back on for years to come :)

I think this will be a must-do again next year!

Classroom!

I have been out of town for a lot of the summer but I am back in town and have been working on my room a lot the past few days!  

I've got a long way to go but here are some pictures of what I've got so far:

Welcome to Miss Paul's room!

When you walk in towards the back of the room there is the "second grade road".  Next to it is a sign with a bunch of things we will be learning this year!  This little display may just be one of my favorite things in the whole room!  I saw the idea written about somewhere, expect for the signs were all along the road.  I changed mine up a little :)  The stick that the signs are on is a bolt from fabric.

This is my carpet area!  Calendar, morning meeting, read aloud, story sharing, lessons, etc, it's all going to go down right here : )

On the stand next to my chair I have my compliments and concern jars.  Students can write compliments and or concerns that are distributed or discussed at our weekly class meetings.

Mountain Language will go up on this bulletin board.  Above the bulletin board is my birthday train!  It says "All aboard the Birthday Express".  I put the kids names along with the day that they were born on strips above the car with the month in which they were born.

I decorated above some of the cabinets with things from around the world.  I've got a travel theme going on if you haven't picked up on that yet.

Bookshelf. Still need to do a little organizing.

This is my wolf.  He is from Mexico.  I have the students put him on their desk when they go to the bathroom.  This way only one person is out at a time and I can always see who is out. 

This is a combo of two quotes that I found on Pinterest of course.  I painted it.  A little inspiration for my kiddos!

Rules, consequences, rewards.

My bookshelf.  Done Jars and Warm Fuzzy jar are both there!

"Paul Airlines - were learning takes flight"  I found the tag line somewhere and painted it on the airplane that I found at Hobby Lobby.  I just couldn't pass that plane up!

George!  Actually, I don't know what his name will be this year.  I let the kids brainstorm names and then vote on the first day of school.  He goes home with one student each weekend.  They take him home, play with him to their hearts content, write about it all, and then bring him back in his suitcase on Tuesday and share about their weeked with the class.  

 

No Name, No Grade!  This is where no name papers are going this year.  I am going to attach a pen to it with a string so that students can write their name on their paper and turn it back in if their paper does happen to end up here.  Students will be responsible for checking for no name papers.

That's all for now folks!  It's coming along slowly but surely! 

Make your own class hundreds chart!

This is something that I did with my class at the beginning of the school year.  I plan on doing it again this year, I thought I would share.

First, I got out my huge hundreds chart! See THIS post for more on the hundreds chart. 

We talked about what it looked like and what it could be.  I asked them if it could be a hundreds chart and if it was a hundreds chart where would 1 be?  They helped me number it.  We wrote on it with a dry erase.  I had kids go and stand on different numbers so that we could notice patterns (e.g. if you add 10 you will end up directly below the number you started at.)  After we had explored the hundreds chart and numbers a little bit I gave each student some squares and assigned them numbers to write.  We then put them all together to make our very own hundreds chart that was up in our classroom all year!

Spelling Bee!

We finished with our last spelling list two weeks ago but I wanted to keep spelling going through the end of the year, so I decided that we would have a class spelling bee! About two weeks ago I gave students a huge list of all our second grade sight words and some other words that the students use frequently and should know how to spell including some homophones. We have had a count down going in the classroom and the students have been studying at home. Today was the day! Our class spelling bee! I had the students put their desks in a huge semi circle around the outside of the room. We lined up all their chairs in the middle. They sat down and came up in order. When they came up to the front I gave them a word, thy repeted it, spelled it, and the repeated it again. If they got their word right then they returned to their seat, if they got it wrong then they went and sat on their desk on the outside and watched. I kept track of the order in which the students went out. At the end students got to come up (starting with the winner and ending with the first person out) and pick out a prize! The spelling bee was great! My kids had fun with it and so did I! I think that an end of the year spelling bee will have to become a tradition in Miss Paul's Class!