Hello, Goodbye!

I have recently left my district due to a move to the Austin area.  I am now teaching 5th grade.  Please visit my new class blog:

http://readingrockstars.blogspot.com/

Making Memories

I asked students to reflect on our school year and asked them the following question.  What is something that we did this year that you think you will remember for the rest of your life?  I truly enjoyed reading their blog posts. The overall theme of them is that it is the relationships we build that have a lasting impact. I know I have many, many wonderful memories of our year.  

I want to extend a special thank you to the students, parents, staff, and community of Polser Elementary. I have enjoyed learning alongside you this year.  As most of you are aware, my husband and I are relocating to the Austin area to be closer to family; however, I will carry a piece of each of you in my heart.

Alex

Allan

Andrew

Caleb

Dylan

Emerson

Gianna

Ja'Michael

Jordan

Kathleen

Mia

Morgan

Olivia

Payton

Serena

SrRyan

Sydney

What's New at the Zoo?

We just wrapped our our last PBL of the year.  While I have enjoyed all of our PBL experiences this year, I think this one is my personal favorite!  The staff at the zoo were absolutely wonderful with the students.  Check out the blog the Dallas Zoo wrote about our experience here.  

Mayor of Our Classroom

Weather Fashion Show

Today we began a new unit of study in science entitled Seasons and the Weather.  To begin our unit, we held Weather Fashion Relay Races.  Parents helped us prepare for the unit by signing up on Sign Up Genius to send in various clothing items.  

Students were divided into teams.  Each team selected one team member to be the "fashionista" and one team member to be the "fashion model."  I showed each team a picture of what the weather looked like and each "fashionista" had one minute to select items to dress their model in clothing that was appropriate for the shown weather conditions.  

This was a great opportunity for me to assess student prior knowledge of weather terms, temperatures, and information about the seasons.  I will be using the information I collected during this formative assessment to help guide my instruction during the unit.  We will also be able to refer back to this activity during our unit.  

Below are some pictures and videos of our activity.  Special thank you to the parents who helped supply clothing and other items for our activity today. Also thank you to Morgan and Kathleen you acted as our paparazzi during our fashion show. 

Weather Fashion Show Superstar Style

Round 1

The weather condition shown

Round 2

Shown weather condition

 Fashionistas selecting clothing

Round 3

Shown weather condition

Round 4

Angel rocking his flip flops.  :)

Round 5

For this round, students were not shown a picture.  I just told them that they got out of bed and dressed without looking at the weather or checking the news or any apps to see how they should dress.  I told them they could see the weather conditions after they got dressed.  Here is what we came up with. 

And here was the weather condition

We were able to talk about how the weather impacts our clothing and activities...and when we forget to check the weather conditions, we are sometimes caught off guard.  We are looking forward to learning more about the weather and seasons during our unit.  

World Read Aloud Day

Each year, World Read Aloud Day is celebrated on the first Wednesday of March.  This day calls global attention to the importance of reading aloud and sharing stories.  

We celebrated by chatting via Skype with Monica Carnesi.

We discussed her book Little Dog Lost which is based the true story of a dog named Baltic, who was rescued after he floated out to sea on an ice floe after traveling more than 75 miles down the Vistual River in Poland.  

Ms. Carnesi shared how she first heard about the story of Baltic on the news and decided to draw a picture of his adventure and post it to her blog. Inspired by the feedback she received, she decided to write and illustrate Little Dog Lost which was her first book.

We had previously visited her blog and learned more about her and was able to see her studio so we had lost of questions for her.  

The most exciting part of our chat was when we learned that Ms. Carnesi had visited our student blogs and had some comments for us on several of our posts.  The kids and I were so excited to learn that an author had visited our blogs!  

You can learn more about Baltic's story and Ms. Carnesi on her blog.  Special thank you to Ms. Carnesi for chatting with us.  We throughly enjoyed our chat!

Open House

Our Open House was a success.  Special thank you to all of our family members who attended.  

Here is a link to the Open House Sneak Preview we sent our earlier that week.

We had been learning how to write letters during writer's workshop, so we wrote letters to someone special, inviting them to attend Open House with us.

The students really enjoyed sharing their learning with their parents.  They were large and in charge this evening.  Since most of our current projects were digital, we created QR codes and parents brought their devices or we had some for check out.  Below are some photographs from the evening:

Sharing our video interviews from our biography project

Sharing our houses and projects from our Who's Afraid of the Big Bad Wolf PBL

Sharing our learning about conservation from our Igniting Creative Energy projects

We also shared our personal timelines that we created

Thank you parents for coming out and being so supportive during our Open House.  It was so wonderful to watch as your children lead you through the their projects.  

Developing Research Skills

During the past several weeks, we have been putting our research skills to work as we learn more about how historical figures, patriots, and good citizens helped shape our nation.  

We began preparing for this project over a month ago when we collaborated with our library media specialist, Ms. Brant.  She taught us how to use the district's online database for research and how to put key words into search engines to find the information when were looking for.  We also had to learn to identify valid and reliable sources. (Did you know you can't believe everything you read?!?)  

During Read to Someone during our literacy block, we began digging deeper into online resources by collaborating to learn more about self selected topics.  

Students selected an individual and collaborated in teams of two or three to research their individual to learn more about the contributions of their individual.  They wrote questions to guide their research and then organized what they found into student selected headings.  They were also asked to synthesize their information and write a summary statement indicating the most important contribution that individual had on our nation.  They used a variety of resources:  primary sources, books, articles, search engines, and our district online database.  

Each group created a visual which included the facts they found during their research and hosted a fictitious talk show were they interviewed their famous historical figure.  

Special thank you to Mrs. Kelly, Mrs. Eicke, and our parents for loaning us costume items.  Check out our learning!

Benjamin Franklin

Sojourner Truth

Alexander Graham Bell

George Washington Carver

Harriet Tubman

Amelia Earhart

Who's Afraid of The Big Bad Wolf?

Our class has been collaborating with Carol McLaughlin's class from Alabama in a Project Based Learning (PBL) challenge.  Ms. McLaughlin and I met on a Twitter Chat (#2ndchat) several months ago.  The topic of the chat was engaging science lessons and we decided to collaborate to complete a PBL Ms. McLaughlin has already started to plan.  After a couple Saturday afternoon Skype sessions and numerous tweets, we had laid out the framework for our PBL.  During this project, our classes kept in contact with each other through Twitter and Skype.  

Our Driving Question was: 

How can we, as second grade real estate developers, design, build, and market the cheapest home that will protect the three little pigs from the big bad wolf?

Our entry event included reading stories about the three little pigs and watching a video of students designing a home.  

Student groups then listed out what they knew and needed to know and created our PBL board.  

Next, students were given a list of materials they could use to build their homes along with a price list for each item.  

Then students designed tests with the individual items to see how they would stand up to wind created as the wolf huffed and puffed. 

After testing, groups met to discuss what they had learned about the individual materials.  They realized that they would not be able to build their houses with just one of the items on the list, they would need to combine materials.  

Students had individual thinking time to brainstorm how they would like to build their homes and then student groups met.  After much discussion and compromise a single house design for the group was decided upon.  

Then the shopping began.  Students had to calculate and keep track of construction costs.  

After their initial construction, groups could test their houses to see how it would stand up to the huffing and puffing of our big bad wolf and make any modifications they wanted.  

Finally, we were ready for the final test to see how their house would stand up to the wind.  You can see our results here.  

Next we had to learn more about how to market our homes to the three little pigs.  We invited Kathryn Schuetts, a local real estate agent in to teach us how she helps potential buyers find homes.  

Mrs. Schuetts met with each team and gave them feedback and asked guiding questions to help them think through how to publicize their home.  

Here are our presentations for the pigs

To prepare for our presentations each group presented their projects to our class.  Students used the project rubric to give them feedback.  

The three little pigs visited our classroom.  They gave each team feedback on their projects and then selected the home that best fit their needs.  

We enjoyed a Skype chat with our friends in Ms. McLaughlin's class.  Students were able to share their home designs and learning.  

Click on the links below for student reflections.

Emerson         Mia          Kathleen         Allan        Serena         Alex          

Morgan          Olivia          SrRyan          Payton          Gianna          Nadia

Caleb Dylan      Sydney     Andrew

Pep Rally

On Friday, second grade performed at the monthly pep rally.  Parents, if you have any additional pictures or video you would be willing to share, let me know and I will post it on our blog for others to view.  

We also created a video with a special shout out to our 3rd grade teachers.  

The kids did a great job! 

Online articles

If you are looking for online resources to articles for elementary students, check out my collection in the this online binder below.  Since these links do go to sites outside of my control, please always check the content before you share with students.  These are a great, inexpensive way to incorporate nonfiction into your child's daily reading.  Superstar parents, you could grab a Parent Pipeline of a reading strategy we have been working on in class and sit next to your child as they read and discuss.  

If you have other sites you use, please send me the link so I might include them in my binder.  

Happy reading!
Mrs. Haney


Click here to open this binder in a new window.

Collect 50 Cents Class Championship Playoff Superstar Style

One of the things we love the most about our Investigations math resource is the fact that we learn many of our math concepts though games.  This gives the students an authentic reason to learn the content.  While we enjoy all the games, the Collect Coins series is a classroom favorite.  We first learned Collect 25 Cents and recently learned Collect 50 Cents.  

After we have played the game for awhile, we have started the tradition of having class championship playoffs. This started as a suggestion from one of our students, Alex, who is a self proclaimed sports fanatic.  Since I did not have much background in structuring play off championships, I searched the internet to find a resource that would allow me to build playoff brackets.  I found the resources at PrintYourBrackets.com very user friendly for those of more sport challenged individuals.

Here is what our class bracket looked like from our last championship:

During our last championship, we may have set the bar high for future playoffs.  I wish I could take credit for any of this, but absolutely none of the ideas came from me nor did I have any input in the content.  Students created these on the fly.  I just knew I had to document what they were doing and grabbed the iPad.  

We had an announcer

A Commercial

A Halftime Show

Post Game Interviews 

Learning from our Twitter Friends

We recently read the book Recess at 20 Below by Ciny Lou Aillaud.  As we read the book, we merged the experiences of the students from the story with our experiences and tracked our thinking.  We realized we had many questions.  Some of them were answered by further reading of the text, but many of our questions went beyond the text.  

As we were reading the text, Mrs. Haney remembered a teacher she had met on Twitter during one of the live chats she participates in (#2ndgradechat.) Ms. Nairn and her students live in Canada where the temperatures had recently dipped down to -51 degrees Celsius with the windchill (-59 degrees Fahrenheit)

We contacted Ms. Nairn's class through Twitter and they agreed to Skype with us to answer some of our questions about what it was like to have recess when it was so cold outside.  

During our Skype session, they showed us what their playground looked like. It was covered with so much snow that the swings rested on top of the snow. They talked about what it was like to build snow forts and play soccer on the snow.  We also learned about the clothing they wear during the winter.  They did think it was funny when we told them we were not allowed to go outside if the temperature fell below 40 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius.)

We are so lucky to learn in a district that encourages us to reach out to others beyond our classroom walls.  Being able to tweet and skype with our learning friends has proven to be highly engaging and enables us to explore concepts at a deeper level.