Around the Classroom

Here are a few pictures of the students in the classroom one day. They had a bit of free time to read, draw pictures, or work puzzles.

Field Trip to the Puszta

On the Friday of Stanford Testing week the whole elementary of GGIS (all 70ish of us) took a field trip to the Puszta! It was a ranch type place where some champion race horses live. The kids got to see the horses, go to a petting zoo, take a horse carriage ride, play on a great playground, and watch a horse show. They loved it!

I also loved it! This was my first field trip experience on the "teacher" side of things and it was a great experience to have.

Here are a few pictures from the day:

Stanford Testing and a Baby Turtle

The week of April 11th, we had Standford Testing Monday-Thursday. The students took tests all morning long and then in the afternoons we had some fun. :) One of the fun activities was watching a "baby turtle" hatch. It was not a real turtle. One of the teachers went to America and while she was there she found these eggs that when they were put in water they would gradually hatch a baby animal over a week.  Here are the pictures of our baby turtle, Shelly, hatching.

Day One: Egg in a bucket of water

Day Two: Here she comes!

Day Three: A little more progress

Day Four: A little farther!

Day Five: Meet Shelly the Turtle

Spirit Week at GGIS

This week was Spirit Week at Greater Grace International School where the school dressed up in different outfits each day to show school spirit.

Monday: Pajama Day

Tuesday: Cartoon/Movie Day

Here is one of my EAL students who has recently started really coming out of his shell! I love this picture of him:

A super secret spy...too cute! :)

Wednesday: Old People Day
 Here are some of the teachers (Prep-One, 1st grade, 2nd grade) and two administrators:

I love the look Saki (the girl in the picture) is giving the boys. Definitely a typical look!

Thursday: Cowboy/Indian Day (We in the 2nd grade went with the cowboy look)

That was a cute picture but here is what we are really like! Yee-haw!

Friday: Black/Blue Day (The 2nd grade wore black):

Measure with Feet and Inches

We learned how to measure with feet and inches this past week. The kids had fun measuring each other and how long our classroom was. The girls even measured the hallway for us. They seemed to enjoy it and learned the concept well!

Number Hospital: Doctors in Training!!

Today for math class we learned how to write numbers in expanded form. If you are a little dusty on this term here is an example: 327 written in expanded form is 300+20+7. To teach this concept our classroom transformed into a Number Hospital where sick numbers came.

Before the 2nd grade could see their number patients or perform any operations they had to be trained first. During this training time I, the expert number doctor, taught how to write a number in expanded form because our large number patients were getting sick from being so close to its fellow numbers. I showed them how to carefully cut apart the numbers and how to add zeros to make sure the 300 did not become a 3 or the 20 become just a 2, etc. I also explained the rare cases they might see of numbers coming in written in expanded form but needing to be put back together. So we learned how to write 300+20+7 = 327. After this they were ready to be doctors! I handed out their "Dr." name tags and their surgical masks. They then received 4 patience (ie, numbers to write in expanded form). The students worked carefully on their operations and successfully healed many numbers!

It was a fun activity! I am proud of all my little number doctors! :)

Caught Being a Good Citizen of Our School

In a recent history lesson we learned about being a good citizen of our country. To make this concept a little more personal for my students I decided to have them do an activity I called "Caught Being a Good School Citizen". I assigned each student another student's name. They were supposed to watch their person for the next and write down any time they saw their person do something "good citizen-like" for the class/school. At the end of the time period, we cut out some badges that said "I'm a Good Citizen!" and everybody colored for their person. On the back of the badges the students wrote something that they saw the other person doing that was good. We then had a little ceremony where everyone presented their badges to the person they watched. The students then wore the badges around school for the rest of the day!