Mmm, Cookies!

This week we started an author study on one of my favorite authors, Robert Munsch. We have been reading his books, listening to him read the books (via his awesome website), and doing different activities related to the books. Today we listened to the book, Mmm, Cookies! We used this book to talk about and practice writing book reviews. The students will be writing a book review of their favorite Robert Munsch book next week. There will be more to come about that later. :) In the book Mmm, Cookies!, the main character, Christopher, finds play clay and makes "cookies" out of it. Then he tries to trick his family and friends into eating his play clay cookies. As a nice reward (and break) from all the writing the kids did today on their book reviews, we made our own play clay cookies. Here are some pictures of the kids and their play clay cookies.


Ask your child about the interesting conversation we had about why Mr. Munsch, the author, used the term play clay instead of play dough in his book.

Election 2008

Today we were able to go down to the polling site at NPE. The inspector for the site was nice enough to walk the kids through the process of casting a vote. They were able to see where you sign in to vote and check out a real ballot. He also showed them how people with disabilities vote. There is a machine that scans the ballot and reads it to them. Then all they need to do is touch the screen to cast their vote. Then he showed the kids how a voter puts their ballot into the scanner to cast their vote. They also talked to us about absentee voting. I was very impressed that the polling inspector took the time to talk to the kids on this exciting day!

After we came back to our class, we had our own election. Allie was our registrar, and each child came to her and told her their name. She checked their name off the class list and gave them a ballot with each candidates name and picture on it. The students then went to a mock election booth to mark their ballot. Lastly, they dropped their ballot into the ballot box. The whole second grade participated in this election activity today.

Once all the votes were counted, the results were:

John McCain 44
Barack Obama 40

Recess

These are some pictures I took of the kids out at recess about a month ago.

Halloween 2008

Friday was quite a day in Mrs. Crull's class! We had our Halloween parade and party! The mom's and dad's did a great job planning and helping out in the classroom to make our Halloween party a lot of fun! Here are some pictures from this exciting day.

The little guy is my son Alex who came to walk in the parade. My other son Brannon was there too. Every one's costumes were great! We had Princess Pheona, skeletons, ghostly ghouls, Batman, Darth Vader, a knight, a pirate, a veterinarian, a Granny, and more!

Allie's baby sister was there as a ladybug, and we saw Noah's new baby sister dressed as a bunny!

I was dressed as a "fanatic sports fan". My boys were dressed as Ironman and Optimus Prime. I'm glad Princess Pheona chose Shrek instead of this evil looking guy! Sorry Ryan! :)

Here's our class! Dressed and ready to go!

Parade Time!

Now it's time for some Halloween treats and Bingo!

Catwoman Corie, Darth Vader Matthew, Miss Green Outfit Wearing (not sure what you really were :-) Chloe, Mr. Incredibly Snaggle Toothed Evan, and Dark Knight Jacob were looking good!!!

I thought maybe "Miss Behaving" (ya right! :-) Emma and "Major Flirt" (really :-) Chloe would make a good picture. Gabby, I LOVE your costume! You would make an excellent veterinarian!

Last but definitely not least, Matthew T., our visiting GRANNY! I couldn't believe you chose to wear a dress! :) You crack me up! And Matthew K. and Corie...don't you know better than to pick on a poor old lady! ;-)

Candy Corn Pictures

Today we started the chapter book, The Candy Corn Contest. The teacher in the book brings in a jar filled with candy corn, and the kids are to try and guess how many candy corns are in the jar. As we read the first half of the book today, we ate candy corn and peanut butter kisses (I was surprised how many kids liked the peanut butter kisses!). As we were reading, I came up with the idea to have the kids make Halloween / spooky pictures using candy corn. Here are some of the pictures the kids made. I thought they all turned out neat. :)

Noah - Nice Halloween person

Matthew T. - Cool Bat!

Sydney - I like her two trick-or-treaters

Chloe - Spooky Ghosts

Angelina - Smiley Jack-O-Lantern

Allie - More "Booooorrific" Ghosts

Scary Stories

Today we wrote scary stories. We started out by looking at the picture of the haunted house. Then we brainstormed words that they might use in writing a scary story about the house. Next, I wrote a scary story of my own as an example. Finally they wrote their own scary story. Many of them sound the same because they took some ideas from my story. Everyone did an EXCELLENT job on their story! These are a sampling of some of the stories that were written.

Scary Monster Faces

To go along with our scary stories, the kids made scary monster faces. Here are some of the faces they made. :)

Megan's face is so cool! I love her month the best! It's VERY creepy!

This is Ryan's out of this world alien face! Nice job!

Matthew K. did an AWESOME job on his werewolf face!

Gabby's face is the "cat's meow"! It is purrrfect! ;)

Emma's mummy face is a "wrap"! She worked very hard on it!

Evan's monster face took a lot of time and has a lot of details. Nice face monster man!

Corie's monster face has creepy eyes! It's monsterific! :)

Bat's at the Children's Museum

Over fall break I was able to see a really cool program at the Children's Museum! It was on bats. They said that they do it every year, so if you remember it next year, you should ask your parents if they could take you. They talked about bats and brought 4 different kinds of bats to show us. They also walked around the room so that everyone could see them close up! They brought 2 small bats and 2 large bats. The two small bats were the dog face bat and the little brown bat (I think). The large bats were both fruit bats. One was the same kind of fruit bat that the book Stellaluna was written about. The other bat was the largest kind of bat there is, a Malaysian fruit bat. It was really cool and big. I think that they said that its wing spand is 5 feet. That means that when their wings are completely spread out, the length from wing tip to wing tip would be 5 feet! That is taller than most of you!!!!

I hope you enjoy the pictures! :)

Look...It's Stellaluna! :O)

This is the Mayalasian fruit bat...the largest kind of bat!
Aren't its feet cool. They really do look like our hands! The lady just walked around with the bat hanging from her arm like a purse. Her 2 daughters that were in 2nd and 3rd grade were there helping her.