A New Leg to my Journey!

I have some very exciting news to tell you today. In a few weeks I will begin blogging for Scholastic.com! It was such a surprise to be asked to do this and I feel very honored to be a part of such a great company! I don't have the link yet but I will let you know as soon as I can. You can find the general area of where I will be by going to scholastic.com and clicking on the Teacher tab. I will still post here part of the time but will be blogging every week on their site. If you are my friend on Facebook you can look for the links, as I post them, to see what's happening in my classroom!


I'm headed out to New York City for training at their offices in Soho. I've never been there before so I have some sightseeing time scheduled into my trip. It will be fun working some of my trip into my "journey" theme this fall. I've been email-visiting with the other 7 teachers who are joining me in this adventure and I can't wait to meet them. It's going to be a great year!


Along with packing, I worked in my classroom a couple of days last month. My furniture is arranged, for the most part, and, since I'm keeping the journey theme, I can begin focusing on the first 2 weeks of school. That first day is just around the corner!

A Team that Stands (or shops) Together...

I love my diverse grade level team! There are 5 of us at 2nd grade and we are all unique. We encourage each other and celebrate the differences. We have fun talking before and after school and that alone can make a hectic day much nicer!

For the second summer in a row, we have taken a day trip together to do some "before school" shopping. Wichita doesn't have much variety when it comes to  teacher stores so we head out early on a summer morning to travel to Kansas City or Oklahoma City for the day. An hour or two spent shopping, discussing and helping each other find things to go with our themes, and we need a break. More often than not, we find ourselves at The Cheesecake Factory! After lunch and, of course, some yummy cheesecake, we find the strength to get back out there and do some more shopping!

A few days after school was out, we went to Emporia State University to hear Harry Wong speak. It was nice to see that there were so many teachers who were willing to travel from all over Kansas during their summer break to hear him speak. Of course, we took a few minutes to stop and get a picture of us in front of the home (now museum) of our school's namesake, William Allen White who was a well known journalist in Emporia, Kansas.

We have also become a 21st century team. As of last month, we all have iPhones! I don't know of another team that has as many group message sessions as we have. Sometimes the topic is a question about school or a sale on school supplies that one of us has just spotted. Other times, it's just friendly joking or personal news.


A strong team is a wonderful thing! Our jobs can be stressful and difficult at times. It's nice to have people next door or across the hall that understand and know how to take the pressure off. I'm thankful for my team.

Thanks, Uncle Reuben! A Teacher's Reflection

Studying the life and journeys of Uncle Reuben was such a deep and rich experience. The material gave my students opportunities to review, practice and apply multiple skills that they have learned over the year.

Skills they used and practiced:

• Working in a group
• Cooperating and taking turns
• Measuring miles on a map
• Map reading
• Adding large numbers (over 1000)
• Calculator use - adding lists of large numbers and checking their answer by comparing it to others
• Measuring distance
• Non-standard measurement
• 
  

Learning:

• Location of states in US
• Transportation of the early 1900's
• History of flight - Wright Brothers, World Flight - 1924
• Concept of time past (100 years)
• The computer as a tool
• Some uses for Word and Excel
• The size of the United States
• Putting events in order according to time
• 
  

Benefits:

• Confidence
• Knowledge of the United States
• Confidence using technology
• Motivation
• Engagement
• Ownership of learning
• 
  

Uncle Reuben's Journeys Part 7 - The Camp Out

Once you've finished the hard work of an inquiry project, it’s fun to show someone what you’ve been learning.

We got the chance to do that in early May. The “invitation” group went to work writing notes and inviting other classes to visit us so we could show them what we learned. The afternoon was a success as evidenced by the discussions I could hear around the room as students shared their new learning with excitement.

Language arts activity

Reading with friends in the tent.

One of our favorite pictures of Uncle Reuben is him sitting by a campfire next to a small canvas tent.

I had come across some camping themed math and language arts activities online that would be perfect for a courtyard camp out during the last week of school. We pitched our tent, grabbed something to sit on and headed for the school courtyard for the morning. There were 12 activities to keep the class busy and s’mores for a reward partway through the tasks. It was a nice way to end both our unit and a wonderful 2nd grade year!

Cooler serves as table for story problem work.

Uncle Reuben's Journeys Part 6 - The Biplane

Keeping the students busy wasn’t too difficult. A group of boys made a chain of colored links the length of the wingspan on the biplane Uncle Reuben learned to fly in 1924. I thought for sure our room would be big enough but once we looked up the size on the internet and the boys got out the measuring wheel, they (and their teacher) realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. Before long, the door was open and the chain was reaching diagonally across the room, out the door and halfway across the hall.

They measured, added or subtracted links, and measured again until they were certain the chain was exactly 43 feet and 7 inches.

One concept they learned by doing this is that the chain measured the same if it was straight or curled around the desks.

 A second chain was constructed and measured for the length of the plane (27 feet).


We weren't going to be able to experience the size of the plane in our room so we carried the chains to the courtyard and put them in place.

 The kids and one of their favorite co-op students took their places on the chains and posed for a picture.

Note: If you try this yourself, remember that the chain tangles easily and needs to be carried stretched out instead of bunched up. We learned the hard way!

Uncle Reuben's Journeys Part 5 - The Time-line

Uncle Reuben lived to be 100 years old; “and 1 month,” a student would usually remind me. What a great number for 2^nd graders! Time-lines were being introduced in the math chapter we were working on so we decided to make a timeline display of Reuben’s life. We would be able to develop skills for working with time-lines as well as number lines. I had a few pictures to contribute to the board and stapled a strip of white paper, marked off in 5 year segments, and the pictures to the board for them. A second strip was placed below to represent the 10 years of travel that he did starting in 1924. I then began handing the project over to a group of students.

Every child in the class illustrated some part of Uncle Reuben’s journeys. The group began organizing the pictures. I noticed some girls working with the illustration cards on the carpet one day. Our carpet has a large map of the United States on it. They were placing the illustrations on that giant map and telling the story of his journeys to each other. It was interesting to see what they remembered and whether or not they could find the places on a different type of map. (They could!)

Two students, and several helpers, typed captions for each picture and illustration and those were printed off, cut apart and taped in place. Here is a picture of the finished timeline.

The timeline became a very useful tool and was referred to often when a date would show up in something we were reading. 

Uncle Reuben's Journeys Part 4 - The Model T

The pictures I’ve posted so far show about half of the class so some of you are probably asking, “What were the other students doing while this was going on?”  They were busy!  I had just shown the class how to make a video with pictures, text and music using PhotoStory3 but I hadn’t let them work with it on their own yet. 

Not long before, I had run across a Model T Coup like the one Uncle Reuben had ridden in, all the way up into Canada, following the harvest. It was sitting right next to me, in the showroom, while I was waiting on my car to be serviced one Saturday. Ignoring the looks I was most likely getting from other “waiters”, I pulled out my phone and started taking pictures of it from every angle. I wanted the kids to get an idea of how small it was; especially to hold three twenty-something young men for more than 1000 miles along bumpy, dirt roads. We had already watched some videos I had found online of a Model T going down the road so they were familiar with the car and the way it looked and sounded.

We loaded the Model T pictures onto a computer and I let some students work together to move the pictures around, edit them and add text and music while standing around the SmartBoard. It worked great and they got to practice their PhotoStory3 skills before they started on their individual video projects at the end of the year. They got skills and I got future trainers to help everyone else learn! What fast learners! We didn't get a finished product but they learned the basics.