Day 33- Snap! Crackle! Pop!

It's better than a talking cereal, it's

ONOMATOPOEIA!!

 What is onomatopoeia? It's when a word makes a "sound". Fizz! Buzz! Woof! We read a poem today that had some sound words in them, so we made a chart (of course we did!) of more sound words that we knew. (please pardon the chart, I -ahem- didn't know how to spell onomatopoeia properly until I got on here and the spell checker scolded me. I will fix the chart tomorrow!)

I will, of course, let my students know that I misspelled the word on purpose, in order for them to see that teachers occasionally make mistakes too.
In order to fill in the chart, we read the poem first, then I had them do a little listening activity. They closed their eyes and listened as I drummed my fingers on the table. They opened their eyes, and I asked them what they heard...
a horse running
tapping
a dragon
a drum
a dog running/ cat running
rain falling
Totally not what I was expecting, it was better! My soldiers have great imaginations!

The poem we used is from a Scholastic book called 101 Thematic Poems for Emergent Readers.

I actually got this book for free when Scholastic put many of their Teacher books on sale for $1, and I got a coupon code for $10 worth of free books! SCORE! I'm not a great coupon-er, but I could be! Here is the poem...

We went through and found all the "sound" words. I will just let you imagine 17 six year olds making all the noises after we underlined them; it was a hoot! :)

Another poem we read was on birthdays, given to us by Ms. Leahy.

Some comprehension questions:
What did the author decide to do? What steps did he or she have to follow? What was the cake's shape? Why would candles make a birthday bright?
I didn't do it today, but I think tomorrow I'll have the kids illustrate what their cake would look like if they had to follow the poem's guidelines. It sounds pretty straight-forward, but I'm guessing my soldiers will surprise me with some awesome creativity.
We might even add to our onomatopoeia chart the sounds that making a cake would create! Whisk, scrape, ding!

Centers today...

 Team 4's handiwork.

 Team 2- finding sight words

 Math was making subtraction number sentences. Words can not express the difficulties my students are having mastering this skill. The thought that addition and subtraction are related, and the numbers can be moved around to make the different number sentences is mind-boggling! I'm feeling a Math Power Circle tomorrow. We are going to master this! (I wouldn't usually stress over this, but Fact Families are a BIG part of second grade.)

We completed our Landforms power point today. Our favorite landform of today was island. We took a Virtual Fieldtrip of Hawaii to check out America's island. The kids loved seeing pictures and video of active volcanoes! After we reviewed all the landforms, the students chose their top 4 and illustrated them. 

Here is a sampling of their work. 90% of my students chose to put a volcano on their papers! I think exploding mountains are pretty interesting too, so I don't blame them!

Tomorrow we bring in science and talk about the different animals we would find in those different landforms. (habitats)

Our Daily Brain