Riverfront Highlights

There are a few things that all students (and teachers) look forward to each school year and one of those things is a wonderful field trip. The last one we went on was last fall so it was due time for another one. After contemplating various locations, the other second grade teachers and I decided to take our students to Columbia's Riverfront Park. We had never taken students on a field trip here, but we were SO glad that we did! The trip was completely outdoors, was filled with tons of hands-on activities (including wading/splashing/trampling through a river), hit tons of second grade standards, and, best of all, was completely free! I would highly recommend this field trip to anyone in the Columbia area and I think that all of the students would agree. They couldn't stop talking about all of the things they learned and I could tell it really reinforced many of the science concepts we've studied throughout the year. Other than the snake we caught in the river (eek!!), I would go again in a heartbeat! 

Here is my small group going on a walking tour/scavenger hunt. We found lots of interesting plants and animals...

...such as this snail!

We might have scared away most of the animals with our trampling, but we had a good time.

Our little snake...eekk!

Poetry Month

In celebration of National Poetry Month, we wrote a different type of poem each week during the month of April. Our celebration began with us writing acrostic poems, followed by cinquains and haikus. The students really caught on to these different poems and had a wonderful time picking topics to write about. For our acrostic poems students chose a "springy" word as their topic and then created a kite to display their work on. Our cinquains focused on friendship (and included an official friend interview to become informed of their writing topic) and the haikus centered around animals, which we were studying in science at the time. In addition to writing poems, we also read poems whenever possible. The students have become obsessed with Shel Silverstein and all of his wonderful poems! We have started a new end of the day tradition in which students pick a page number and I randomly read aloud from one of his books. I think the students can officially be called poetry experts at this point!

Our acrostic kites proudly displayed in our hallway