St. John Berchmans Second Grade
Catholic Schools Week
What a week we had! Catholic schools week is always so much fun, but also a little exhausting! We got together with our faith partners multiple times and celebrated our amazing school with fun dress down days!
Monday: School Spirit Day and Blessing Bags
Tuesday: Career Day
Wednesday: Color Day and Bead Bracelet Making
Thursday: 100th Day of School and Hundred Games
Friday: SJB School Spirit and Mystery Teacher
Space
We spent the month of January learning all about space and our solar system! Each student researched a plant, the sun or the moon and presented their project to us. Everyone's project turned out amazing and it was so fun to learn about the different planets and compare them to each other. We went to The Hopper twice to complete two different activities. The first was a project about the orbits of the Earth and Moon. The second was a moon phases project created with oreos! We had a blast!
Merry Christmas and happy new year!
We had a very busy holiday season! We got to do many fun activities as well as do 15 acts of kindness! Here is a look at all the fun we had!
Happy Thanksgiving
We have spent a lot of time talking about what we are thankful for! I am so thankful for each student and to be their teacher at this wonderful school! Wishing you all a Happy Thanksgiving and hoping you get to spend it with your family and friends!
Here is what we have been up to!
Spirit Week
We had a blast celebrating our school! We dressed in our decade gear, read books to our faith partners, cheered on the teachers during their floor hockey game, and were pretty funky on Friday! Just another reason why we LOVE our school!
Thanksgiving Feast
Fall Fun in Second Grade
Pumpkins in the Hopper
We spent time in the Hopper again! This time we were able to design our own pumpkins! Each student was able to choose any materials they wanted and create a pumpkin from them. We had students use beads, pipe cleaners, cardboard boxes, and egg cartons! Everyone did an amazing job creating! After they finished, they drew what they made and wrote what they used to make their pumpkin.
Halloween!
We had so much fun celebrating Halloween this year! We read a lot of Halloween stories throughout the week and did activities to go along with them. We had a blast at Halloween fest and at our Halloween party! Thanks to our wonderful room parents for making it a fun afternoon!
Chicago Botanic Gardens
We went on our first field trip of the year! We learned all about conifer trees and got to sort the four different pine needles into their correct group. We even made a tree guide to help us know the difference between the trees and were able to go exploring them around the gardens! It was a perfect day and we had a blast!
The Hopper
We have had two opportunities in September to visit our new Hopper space!
The first time we visited, we just explored the room and talked about how we should behave when we are learning in the space.
The second time, we did a STEM challenge! Each student was given a cup of legos and had to estimate how many they had in their cup. Once they made their estimate they started counting their total amount. After recording their total amount, it was time to start building! The challenge was to build something using every lego piece in your cup. For some, this was very easy, but for others, it was a little more difficult! Once they finished, they then had to draw what they made. We had an awesome time working individually on this challenge and are looking forward to completing more challenges this year!
Welcome to Second Grade 2019-2020
We have had so much fun over these first few weeks of school! We have played getting to know you games, learned how to work in each of our reading centers, and have been loving all of our specials.
We have been focusing on Kindness and are looking for kind acts that our classmates do throughout the week. We are going to spend the year being kindness monsters! At the end of each day, we read the acts of kindness from inside our monster and talk about ways we can continue being kind throughout the rest of the week! Here is our monster and some acts of kindness seen during the first week of school!
This year we are also the older faith partners to the Ocean Buddies, PK classroom! Everyone couldn't wait to meet their partner! We got to meet them and play outside with them and then had our first Faith Partner Fun Day! Here are some pictures of us with our partners!
We are so excited to continue learning and growing together this year! Keep checking back for more updates!
New school year!
Catholic Schools Week
While our Catholic schools week was a little mixed up due to the very cold weather, we still had a blast celebrating our school! We got together with our faith partners twice, celebrated our school spirit at the pep rally, and celebrated the 100th day of school! Here is a look at some of the fun we had!
christmas
We celebrated the Christmas season by doing 15 acts of kindness to countdown to Christmas break. We had a lot of fun celebrating this special holiday together and with our elf Chippy! On our las day before bread we ended with creating our very own gingerbread houses! Here's a look at all the fun we had!
Halloween and Thanksgiving
We had so much fun celebrating Halloween and Thanksgiving! We had a great time playing games and listening to our classmates in the band at Halloween Fest! After the fest, we had a little party in our classroom. We played bingo, listened to a story, had a snack, and made a bat book mark!
We celebrated Thanksgiving by talking about all the things we are thankful for and celebrating with a special Thanksgiving feast with first and third grade! Here are some pictures of us celebrating these exciting celebrations!
Fall in Second Grade
We have been having an amazing fall! We have been working hard to complete a lot of different fall activities. Here is a look at what we have been up to this fall! There are so many more exciting things to come from now until Christmas break!
Walk to School Day! We enjoyed our walk to school morning together. It was a nice day out and during morning meeting, we made a graph of how each of us got to school that morning.
Pumpkins! We've spent the last week learning all about pumpkins. We made a list of things we wanted to learn and from there got to explore a pumpkin as a whole group as well as in a small group at our table! We created a pumpkin book and even wrote a story or described a pumpkin we made. We've been having a blast writing and learning about pumpkins!
centers and faith partners
We have been super busy in second grade! We started working in centers in both reading and math! Here is a look at what happens in our centers. We are working hard to build our stamina and to make sure we are working the whole time while in our centers!
Reading centers
- Work on Writing: Students work on a different writing piece for the week. This changes every week to every other week and it goes along with what we are learning about in Writer's Workshop.
- Word Work: Students have the chance to work on their spelling words and sight words. We use spelling and sight word tic-tac-toe and they have the chance to write the words in all different ways.
- Read to Self: Students work on reading at their level. They also can choose any book that they want to read as well. This is done on their own and helps them become a more fluent reader. They will keep the same books in their bin for a few days and then get to change them out.
- iPads: Students have the chance to play either a math, reading, or spelling game. Some days I choose for them and other days they get to choose for themselves. This gives them a chance to work on their own and enjoy using the iPad.
- Teacher Table: Students work in small groups with me. We work on different reading and writing skills together. This gives me an opportunity to help in a small group setting.
Math Centers
In math centers, we work each day with a partner to help us understand the concept we learned that day. On Fridays, we work and rotate through each center that we learned during the week. Since we have been learning all about place value, each center has focused on the different ways we write a number and on the value of digits. We've enjoyed getting with a partner and working together!
Faith Partners
We are faith partners with the Ocean Buddies Pre-K classroom! We went and met them in their classroom two weeks ago and then spent time with them at our first Faith Partner Fun Day! For our first Fun Day, we talked about kindness. For our activity, we played on the playground to help our Pre-K friends get to know us a little better! We can't wait to spend more time with our Faith Partners!
First weeks of second grade!
2018-2019
We have enjoyed getting to know each other over the last two weeks. Each day we are learning new things and getting in to a routine. We've spent a lot of time talking about our classroom rules and spreading kindness! I am looking forward to an awesome year with this amazing class! Check back every other week to get a peak at what we are doing in our classroom!
First holy communion
What a great weekend we had celebrating our First Holy Communion. The weather was great and everyone looked so handsome and beautiful! I am so proud of everyone's hard work and loved being able to share in the special day with everyone! We ended our First Communion week with May Crowning with the 8th Graders.
Field Trip
We celebrated the end of the year with a field trip to the Museum of Science and Industry! We had a great day exploring Science and learning new things. Some of our favorites included the weather, especially the tornado and lightning, the mirror maze, the submarine and the space exhibits! Thank you to our chaperones for coming with us!
Around the world night
We had so much fun learning about England for this years Around the World Night! We spent time researching our country using nonfiction books, created many special monuments around England, and putting together a puzzle of London. A big thank you to Will and the Gordon family for sharing some special pictures and other things from their time living in England!
Easter to Spring
We had so many exciting things happen before we went on spring break! We planned many fun activities to get us ready for Easter and excited for spring break. Here is a look what we have been up to! We celebrated with fun Easter activities with our Faith Partners and ended with Spiritual Olympics! So much to celebrate!
Lots of love and oh so lucky!
We have been very busy in February and March! We spent a lot of time over the last few weeks preparing for our First Reconciliation! I am so proud of everyone for working hard and really thinking about what they should tell God. It was a wonderful prayer service and now we have our First Communion to look forward to!
In February we spent time celebrating Valentine's Day. We talked about what love is what love feels like. We worked on ABC order as we passed out our Valentine's and had a fun day celebrating!
We started March off with our favorite March Mad Minutes Party! We read a bunch of Dr. Seuss books, but decided to make our hats from Horton Hears a Who! We hope our class read the most minutes! Everyone wanted to keep reading during morning work and quiet time to get extra reading in!
We celebrated St. Patrick's Day with a fun descriptive writing activity. We created wanted signs for leprechauns and then made a directed drawing of our wanted leprechaun! We searched for any leprechaun evidence on Friday morning! Look at what we found! We then celebrated with fun and interactive math centers! We started with graphing Lucky Charms and even followed direction on hundreds charts to color two pictures!
Catholic schools week
We began Catholic Schools Week by researching planets for our Science Fair project! We studied the eight planets plus the sun and moon! Each student was in charge of learning about one of them and then they created a model and poster board to teach us about their planet, sun or moon. We had the BEST time learning about the solar system and everyone's projects turned out great! We are ready to begin another research project!
Throughout the week, we did many activities that revolved around our amazing school! We made blessing bags for the homeless with our Faith partners. We wrote about reasons we love SJB. We celebrated our 100th day of school with fun center activities. We ended our week with a pep rally and pizza lunch! We had a great week and love that we are apart of the wonderful SJB community.
Here are some other pictures from January that we wanted to share with all of you!
december
Time is flying in second grade! This past month we have been busy lighting the world with kindness!
We started off Advent with Faith Partner Fun Day. We created candy canes out of pipe cleaners and beads and talked about the meaning of the candy cane and Jesus. We then watched a movie and had a snack with the ocean buddies. We love getting together with our faith partners!
We received a special delivery from The North Pole! An elf to watch us at school and report back to Santa. We named him Darth Vader and loved seeing what he was up to each day. He left us messages from Santa and did some pretty silly things throughout his time in our room. We will definitely miss him!
During the last 15 days of school before Christmas, we did The Gift of Kindness. We performed one random act of kindness each day. We passed out candy canes to every teacher, made cards for soldiers and people in nursing homes, invited someone to play with us at recess, and overall showing kindness in our classroom.
We ended December with our Polar Express Day! It was a fun-filled day with a lot of book comprehension activities followed by the watching the movie with some special treats!
We created a lot of different art projects this month and had a lot of fun celebrating the Christmas and Advent Seasons!
Happy New Year! Looking forward to a great 2018 with a lot of exciting things to come!
Thanksgiving
We spent most of November talking about all the things that we are thankful for! Thanksgiving is a great time to remind each other of all the great things we have in our life. We did a lot of projects that focused on being thankful and even made Thanksgiving cards for local firefighters and police officers. We spent 12 days writing one thing we are thankful for and a reason why. Some of the many things we are thankful include: family, friends, school, our teachers, homes, and food.
We celebrated Thanksgiving with a Thanksgiving Feast for everyone in 1st-3rd grade. We were in charge of decorating place cards for each student. We all got to sit by other students and really enjoyed the delicious food! Thank you to everyone who helped out!
We got to spend time with our Faith Partners and worked together on making a turkey and necklaces out of fruit loops. We really love getting together with the Ocean Buddies and helping them with the projects we make.
Halloween and Nature Field Trip
October seems to have come and gone so fast! We had a very busy month and now are getting ready for Thanksgiving.
We really enjoyed our Halloween this year! Everyone had very creative costumes and had a blast at Halloween Fest! We did a directed drawing before heading to the fest and created our own sugar skulls. They all turned out so unique! Thank you to the parent volunteers that came in for our little class party. We made spider webs with yarn and popsicle sticks and spiders out of tootsie pops and pipe cleaners. We ended the day watching a Halloween movie helping us relax after a fun filled day!
We worked for two weeks on writing our own stories about Fall. We started with a graphic organizer to get our thoughts on paper. Who are the main characters, where does the story take place, and what the main idea is. We then wrote what we want to have in the beginning, middle, and end. After we had our thoughts written, everyone wrote a rough draft. I sat with them and we read the story together and made corrections. Then they were ready for their final draft and pictures! Everyone took their time to make sure that they made their final draft look perfect! We then shared them with the class before sending them home to read with our families.
We finished up Halloween week with a candy corn experiment. We put candy corn into four different solutions: water, water and baking soda, water and vinegar, and salt water. We made predictions about what would happen and then let the candy corn sit in the solution for 5 minutes. We went back and wrote what we noticed happen and then shared with the whole class.
We started the month of November with a field trip to Emily Oaks Nature Center! It was a cold day, but we had a ton of fun! We went on a guided senses walk through the trail and used different senses and tools to help us discover more about nature! We had a blast playing at the park when we were finished too!
Pumpkins, Pumpkins everywhere!
We have been working hard learning about Fall and pumpkins! We are enjoying the beautiful weather and getting to play outside everyday! We are hoping the fall weather will stick around so we can enjoy it more.
We spent a whole week learning about pumpkins. We read the book From Seed to Pumpkin and then created a pumpkin lifecycle chart. We also worked together and used our senses to describe the inside and outside of a pumpkin. We finished out the week taking out all the seeds and as a table made groups of 10. We then added all of the table seeds together and our total was 541!
Fr. Wayne came in to teach us Religion. He will come in once a month to teach us! We had a lot of questions to ask and we are excited for his next visit so we can ask him more.
We did our first directed drawing of the year! Directed drawing gives everyone the chance to be an artist! I read the step-by-step instructions and drew mine on the board while each student was able to make their own. We made Frankenstein and they all turned out great! Everyone took their time and made their very own drawing and it's so fun to see them turn out so different!
We have been working hard in our reading centers and have enjoyed getting to do all five centers each day. We spend about 10-15 minutes in each center focusing on a different skill.
- Word Work: Students have the chance to work on their spelling words and sight words. We use spelling and sight word tic-tac-toe and they have the chance to write the words in all different ways.
- Work on Writing: Students work on a different writing piece for the week. This changes every week to every other week and it goes along with what we are learning about in Writer's Workshop.
- iPads: Students have the chance to play either a math, reading, or spelling game. Some days I choose for them and other days they get to choose for themselves. This gives them a chance to work on their own and enjoy using the iPad.
- Read to Self: Students work on reading at their level. They also can choose any book that they want to read as well. This is done on their own and helps them become a more fluent reader. They will keep the same books in their bin for a few days and then get to change them out.
- Teacher Table: Students work in small groups with me. We work on different reading and writing skills together. This gives me an opportunity to help in a small group setting.
End of September and Beginning of october
We have been busy getting into the swing of things and have made it through the first six weeks of school!
We started working in all five centers during reading. Each center last for 10-15 minutes as we are still building our stamina. We work on word work, writing, read to self, working with the teacher, and iPads. Each day is something a little different and everyone seems to enjoy completing each center.
This week we learned about apples and wrote informative paragraphs about them. We also made an apple and listed different facts about them. We learned that there are over 7,000 different kinds of apples! We even had an apple taste test to end our week!
We helped the third graders pick fresh tomatoes from the garden during recess.
This week we had a special visit from a Chicago Fire Fighter! We got to ask questions and learn about some important fire safety rules for school and home.
We did our first reader's theater this week! We had three groups and everyone had a role in the play! We worked all week on our reading fluency to make sure we paused at the end of a sentence and had to follow the lines so we knew when it was our turn to talk. It was a lot of fun and we can't wait to do it again!
My little sister is in town this weekend from college, so she stopped by to read us a story! We got to ask her a bunch of questions and had a great visit with her.
Enjoy the three day weekend!
First Weeks of School!
Here is a look at all of the fun things that we have been doing since school began!
We started the year off getting to know one another and talking about how we can become closer to God. We water colored crosses and wrote on them to remember how we will become closer to Him this year!
This year we are going to become Mathematicians. We spent one day discussing what it means to be one and what kinds of tools we need. We made our own mathematicians and wrote how we will be one this year.
We met our faith partners for our first Faith Partner Fun Day! We are partners with the Ocean Buddies Pre-K classroom. We made one decade of the rosary out of pipe cleaners and beads. We even got to play outside with them too!
We have spent a lot of time talking about respect and what it looks like and sounds like. We talked about poems and then we each made our own acrostic poem about respect. We have them hanging up in our classroom so that we remember that this classroom shows respect to one another!
Second grade has been writing a lot and after our literacy centers, each student has an opportunity to share what they wrote with us. They get to sit on the special stool and share their writing! We also work on our reading skills with a partner read to end our reading story for the week.
We are so excited about a great school year! Make sure to check back every two weeks to see all of the amazing things that are happening in 2nd Grade!
