4/29 Welcome back!

What a joy it was to welcome your children back to school this morning. I was pleasantly surprised to hear so many of them say they were happy to be back in school. We are on the homestretch now and your second graders are closer to third grade now. Yikes! It has flown by so quickly! Today we continued literacy block discussing our recent book, Journey of a Pioneer. This narrative nonfiction text talks about the challenges a young girl and her family faces while traveling west along the Oregon Trail. Students looked closely at vocabulary and determined whether a word might signal a challenge or a response. For example, wind, rain, steep mountains and stampede are all examples of challenges the pioneers faced while brave, tragedy, celebrated and sitting watched signaled a response.

4/30 Green Mountain Sing

Thank you to those who joined us this morning for the Green Mountain Sing. Ms. K led the whole school in a sing-along to some of the songs she teaches during music class. There's no sweeter sound than that of children's voices singing together.

4/30 The Eggs Have Arrived!

Today the children added their chicken eggs to the incubator and started the daily routine of logging development. We predicted the eggs would hatch on May 20 since today was day 1 and it takes twenty-one days to hatch. We learned that right now the chicken's brain and nervous system are developing inside the egg.

5/1 Saying Goodbye to Miss Maggie

Today we said our final goodbyes to Miss Maggie. She will graduate from UVM in a couple of weeks and head back to Connecticut shortly after that. The children each contributed to a class book for her, and we had a lovely rose ceremony for her during the school day. We will certainly miss her and wish her the best of luck in her future adventures.

5/2 Marking Challenges and Responses

In literacy, students are getting ready to write another informative paragraph which answers the question, "What challenges did the pioneers face as they traveled west?" Student worked with partners to mark places in their text where there was a challenge. They then used a different colored post-it to mark the response. The second graders noticed that the responses were sometimes positive, negative or neutral.

5/3 Henry's Freedom Box

Today we read the story, Henry's Freedom Box. This is a true story about slave who mails himself in a box to freedom. Students learned about the Underground Railroad and how many slaves found their way to freedom in the mid 1800's. My favorite part about today's lesson was the way the children looked to our timeline to see what else was happening in the world during that same time period. They discovered that while Henry was traveling north in a box, many pioneers were heading west to find land.