Elementary Concert "Songs of Friendship and Love"

On February 14th, Storm Lake Elementary put on a concert featuring songs that fit the theme of Valentine's Day.
The students worked hard and performed well.

"Valentine" song video

Making Learning Fun

At any level of education, one of the biggest road blocks for teachers, and students, is to keep oneself motivated to learn.  Learning requires a majority of your daily energy, keeping your brain tuned in to new information is tough.  Thinking of my previous post about singing a book rather than reading it, is just one novel example of how to change things up and make learning a routine skill a little less routine.
Some other ideas come to mind when thinking about how to keep learning fun and motivating are:

-make it a competition or make a game out of it
-change your routine (instead of reading after dinner, read before bed with flashlights in the dark)
-make it creative

Other ideas can be found at:
motivation and learning

Singing a book?

Last Friday, our students had the pleasure to be able to learn from PBS's own Dan Wardel how to make reading fun.  He sang and had the second graders sing along with him to a book.  The students (and yes I believe the teachers did, too) had a blast.  Even this shy male teacher had a small solo.

Addition and Subtraction

*In math, our second graders have been focusing on learning to subtract and add, especially with larger numbers.  Today we worked on using adding and subtracting with ten to help us add and subtract by nine a lot quicker.  Here are a few of the number sentences we used.

New Year, New Possibilities

As the new year begins, we all have those aspirations to become better people.  Whether its through health, wealth, family, religion or whatever areas we want to improve on, this tends to be the time of the year when our dreams of bettering ourselves starts out with the most momentum.  Yet, for some reason as life starts to take over, we fall back into the same routines.  Why is it so hard to stick to our resolutions?  As a class we discussed ways to stick to our goals for the new year.  Check out our class "kidblogs" and see what our students feel they want to do differently for the year 2012.  


Check out our students' blogs by clicking on the link for Kidblog on this page. 

Have a Happy and Safe Holiday Break

As we end the first half of the school year, I've been thinking about all the things I am  blessed with in my life.  I have a wonderful family and a job that I love.  During this time I am thankful for the opportunity to unwind, and spend time with the ones I love the most.  With that said, there are many ways that we can spend quality time with our families.

Here are a few:
Bake holiday treats (and deliver them to those in need)
build a gingerbread house
Play board games
Put a puzzle together
Watch a movie
Get outside and play (especially if it snows)

For more ideas, check out:  http://www.squidoo.com/kidslovechristmascrafts

Eye Dissection

Yesterday the 2nd grade shared use area was filled with excited 2nd graders.  They had the pleasure of observing nurses dissect a cow's eyeball and explain the parts of the eye.  This matched up perfectly with our class' unit of study on the human body.  We had recently read and discussed the parts of the eye.  This activity cemented their knowledge of this information.