But I had so much planned?!...

It was a magnificent Monday in 2nd grade today. I had so much planned and not enough time. That is always the case, isn't it?

I was super excited to talk about closed syllables today and boy were they excited when I told them one of the super secrets to reading multisyllabic words! First we made our anchor chart and had our discussion where we did spend a bit on talking about vowels vs. consonants. Then we talked about how closed syllables have short sounding vowels. Finally, it seemed they were all getting the hang of it so I threw out the challenge.

The challenge: Looking at the chart and thinking about what we have talked about, can you see or hear another way we can determine how many syllables are in a word?

I was AMAZED that they actually came to it! The number of vowels sounds should tell us the number of syllables because each syllable contains a vowel or vowel sound! Geniuses!!

After completing the anchor chart they had to record it in their reading notebooks. Next we practiced breaking apart words into syllables using highlighters to help us tear the paper. Boy, they LOVED this!

Tomorrow morning when we start our reading block, I will be giving each student a word that I have already made so that they can show me what they learned from today about syllables.

Marvelous Math Time! Today we started with a number recognition activity that I found on Pinterest. I wanted to get a feel with how comfortable they are with number recognition to 100. I randomly called the numbers for them to color as I roamed the room. They did pretty darn good!

 Of course they loved the surprise picture we made.

Another activity that I was able to snap a few pictures of today was an addition to our Reading Notebook. We talked about sentences and what makes a complete sentence. They totally had the hang of this from the start. Then we did a little color coding to label the parts of the sentence we talked about. I wrote the first sentence for them to copy....the one about my mom eating bugs (EEK!) and the other sentence is their creation. I was super proud of the results!

                My dog walks.                                My dad eats bugs on pizza.

I know my time in this classroom with these wonderful thinkers is running short. Today there were two interviews and chances are that one of them will be hired to be the teacher of my class......see, I said MY CLASS! This is going to be tough. As teachers, it only takes a few hours to fall in love with our class. 

We shall see what tomorrow brings. I am looking forward to another day with these amazing kiddos!