Grade Change

I am officially switching back to second grade! It was so much fun to loop my students and work with them for two years. We learned a lot together and I return to second grade with a better understanding of what to do to prepare them for third grade. School begins in a little over a week. I can't wait to meet my new group and begin my 14th year of teaching. My how time flies!

Toys From Everyday Objects

I just watched this fascinating video of Arvind Gupta and his ideas for making play things out of ordinary items. It got me thinking about all of you creative kids who are always using the tools I give you in new ways... :) As a teacher, that has sometimes frustrated me but this video made me think about it differently! Time to explore and create new things is so important. Check out this video and see what it inspires you to create...




Please email me or comment below if you come up with something you'd like to share. Hope you're staying cool and enjoying vacation! :)Ms. G

Pack your bags for Camp What-A-Wonder!

Wonderopolis became a favorite website for our class last year. This summer, they aim to combat 'summer slide' and keep kids' brains engaged all through their vacation with Camp What-A-Wonder. Here's some information from the site:

Wonderopolis® is putting a new twist on an old tradition this summer. Created to combat summer learning loss, a troubling trend of children forgetting a significant amount of what they learned during the school year, Camp What-A-Wonder is a free virtual program to engage families in learning while school is not in session.

Don’t miss Wonderopolis’ weekly Campfire Sessions — a one-hour opportunity for parents to gather and discuss related topics with a facilitator. The topics will focus on the same weekly themes at camp and will take place on Twitter on Thursdays at 8 p.m. EDT. (That's 5:00 for us in San Diego.)

This is a great opportunity for families to learn together and even earn prizes! If you don't already have one, you'll need to set up a Twitter account if you are interested in participating in the online discussions with other parents and the facilitator.

To check out the first of eight sessions, visit Wonderopolis today and learn about poison ivy!

The entry includes a video called "How to Recognize and Avoid Poison Ivy" and a link to an e-book "about your skin and how it works." You can even show off all you've learned by taking one of quizzes. Have fun at camp and be sure to write! :)

Puppet Show ~ June 29

PUPPET SHOW
June 29th, 3pm Pacific Beach Library (Puppet theatre with rhythm instruments for the audience)

ZOMO the Trickster Rabbit from West Africa presented by San Diego Guild of Puppetry. Colorful puppets leap out of the welll-loved book by Gerald McDermott. Come join ZOMO in his search for wisdom!
Performed by Iain Gunn & Mindy Donner

 I wanted to share this opportunity to see our friend Mindy Donner perform. She is a member of an organization called Storytellers of San Diego. Check out their website for opportunities to see live storytelling all over the county.

Synesthesia

I came across a video today that made me instantly think of my students so I had to share! If you follow our blog, you may remember that we read a great book called The Name of This Book is Secret. For more about that, click here. Synesthesia was an important topic in the book and the children often wondered if it was "a real thing." Though we discovered that it was indeed real, we didn't learn much more about it - other than what we learned from the book.

Daniel Tammet, who appears in the video below, has linguistic, numerical and visual synesthesia and is further described as a high-functioning autistic savant. He describes how much richer words and numbers can be to synesthetes. The video actually meant for an adult audience so some of it may be difficult for children to follow but I found it very interesting to hear him describe how he views the world. Check it out and let me know what you think by leaving a comment...

Kids - I miss you all and I hope you are enjoying your vacation so far! Hugs, :)Ms. G

Fun With Words

It's our last week of spelling homework so I thought I'd share a favorite website that I was recently reminded of. :)

From the Wordle website: "Wordle is a toy for generating “word clouds” from text that you provide. The clouds give greater prominence to words that appear more frequently in the source text. You can tweak your clouds with different fonts, layouts, and color schemes. The images you create with Wordle are yours to use however you like. You can print them out, or save them to the Wordle gallery to share with your friends."

This word cloud was created using the words we collected as we read The Name of This Book is Secret. After you create your own Wordle, you may want to save it. You can print it out right away or save it to their public gallery. Another option is to do a screen capture so that you can save the Wordle as a picture file. There's no way to search for your Wordle so be sure to copy the web address before you move on to something else if you want to be able to find it again.

A fun thing to do with Wordle is to create a word cloud without a title and have a friend try to guess what it is about. Here's an example...

Can you guess what the title is?

(hint: this is something we do in class almost every week)

Wordle is a free website so I have a few cautions about it.

• Occasionally, the site seems to freeze up or otherwise not work. It may be helpful to type your words into a text file (in Word or a similar word processor) and then copy/paste them into Wordle. That way, you won't lose all of the text if you have problems with the website.
• Text on Wordle cannot be removed or censored. It is possible to come across word clouds that have inappropriate words in them - *Parents: see the FAQ section for filtering what your child has access to if you are concerned about this.* I have visited the site many times and haven't seen anything inappropriate yet.
• If you post to the public gallery, be sure that you haven't included anything you don't want shared with the whole world. *Kids - this includes using your whole name and anything that gives information about where you live! Always be safe when you are working online.

If you create a Wordle, please share it with us! It's fun to see what others create and gives us great ideas.

The Name of This Book is Secret...

We just finished reading another terrific chapter book, The Name of this Book is Secret by Pseudonymous Bosch. We loved it. I can't believe I didn't look for it sooner but I just discovered the website that goes with the books!



There are three more books in the series and I'm sure that if your child hasn't already asked you to buy them, you'll be getting those requests very soon. :) You can buy used copies on Barnes & Noble for as little as $1.99 or on Amazon for as little as $0.96!

The kids did some writing about the book so I thought I'd include some of their reviews here for you to read...

Luke's Review:

     The book was exiting and funny! These kids named Cass and Max-Ernest found this box that had different smells and then got into a mystery. After that they went to this house to try to solve this mystery.

More reviews coming soon!


If you little reader loves this series, the Lemony Snicket books are another great series to get into. You may be familiar with The Series of Unfortunate Events from the movie of the same name. Here's the website to peak some interest. Enjoy!

Trickster Tale Projects

We are working hard to prepare for this week's Education Celebration. It's an opportunity for us to share PBL (Project Based Learning) projects with LdV families and the community. The children in our class will be sharing their Trickster Tale Projects.

For this project, they are working with a partner to retell a favorite trickster tale and will perform a live shadow puppet show to go along with it. Their retells have already been recorded and the kids have been creating puppets and other props to use for their show.

We'll be finishing up the audio portion of the show by adding a bit of music to the beginning and end of each story. We are going to use Freeplay Music to find music that will help to give more information to the audience about what culture the story came from.

They are also working hard to prepare their shadow puppet shows. With all of their shadow makers ready to go, they are selecting just the right lighting and practicing different effects.

Here are a few of the sites we are using to help us understand what the show should (or could) look like:
Kennedy Center's Playing with Shadows
How To Do Your Own Shadow Puppetry Show
Richard Bradshaw: Shadow Puppeteer
Little Fables
Journey to Neverland Shadowography

Can't wait to see how all of this turns out! We'll have videos of the performances to share with you soon...


Here are a couple of quick videos from our experimentation with shadow puppets:

We Love Polar Bears!

I just saw an interview with John Downer, a filmmaker who used spy cameras to capture polar bears in their natural habitat. You can see his footage on the Discovery channel, coming soon...



We've learned a lot about how animals have to get creative when their food supply disappears. This often means that they get in hot water with the humans that live near their habitats. For more shows on Discovery about polar bears and other kinds of bears as well, click on this link: http://animal.discovery.com/tv/bears/bear-shows.html

More on Tsunamis

This is a video I found posted on the ReadySanDiego Facebook page:


And here is a link to a video from BrainPop: http://www.brainpop.com/science/earthsystem/tsunami/