Work and Play

We are really getting down to work now. We are starting Writer's Notebooks, drafting our first publishing project as of tomorrow, and getting everyone re-assessed during Reading Workshop. Some issues with our two new students who came from other schools in both language and math. The other two new kids (one from another classroom, one from a G&T program) are fitting in well, but the whole class is showing me their true colors now. I know who is congenitally chatty, who needs constant hand-holding, who NEVER brings their folder from home or puts their work in the right place. Sigh. Scales fallen from eyes. They are still adorable, but it's warts and all, now.

Still, I am really pleased to see how much fun they still get to have as second graders. We had choice time today and they'll have it again tomorrow. This is a classroom of art lovers- aside from building with the PVC tubes (see last post) and blocks, everyone else (17 of 25) was doing painting, drawing, or modeling clay. As with last week, this week the kids who chose blocks made a little corral for Cutie-B, the class turtle. Here you can see the construction and one student showing him the stop sign (can Cutie read?).

They also had a lot of fun working on the classroom rules this week. They had done some posters last year which were still up, and they revisited and revised them, and then made new posters, working in groups. Ms. Lee suggested that they could do pop-ups, a kind of 3-D diorama by folding the bottom of the poster paper and making a 3-D illustration out of construction paper. I wasn't sure they could handle the complex cutting and spatial aspects, but they did really well. I had a hard time choosing just two out of the many great projects!!

Contrast this project with the amount of resistance we had to a math assessment which we also had them do today. They were like different kids. If they did math worksheet-type work all day (even Bank Street-style word problems), this class would be the whiniest group of work-avoiding foot-draggers on earth, no lie. It's wonderful to see how well they work together, how creative and focused they are, when they are at play!