Whatcha doin?

Well, we have been out of school for 3 days straight! I have been doing a whole lot of nothing! What have you been doing? If you email me some pictures and write a couple of sentences about what you have been doing these past 3 days, I'll put them on the blog! :)

rcrull@newpal.k12.in.us
and
rebeccacrull@gmail.com

Please send them to BOTH of the email addresses. I don't always get stuff that is sent to my school address.

I can't wait to see what you guys have been doing!

I FINALLY did it!!!!

Well, can you believe it? I FINALLY updated the blog! I had to put the pictures from today on it! And whoever said that I hadn't updated it since Halloween was wrong! ;) Hopefully I will do better...maybe not, but you never know. :)

Enjoy!

P.S. Did anyone else play in the snow when they got home?
I did! :)

Let it Snow!, Let it Snow!, Let it Snow!

Well, today I think we made some cherished school memories! Before the kids had to leave for the day, I decided that it would be fun to "catch snowflakes". I gave all the kids a piece of black construction paper so that they could see the snowflakes better. We all had SO much fun! They "studied" snowflakes on their paper, their coats, their noses, and most of all, their tongues! Thank goodness I remembered to go back and get my camera, because I was able to capture this fun and exciting experience! (Academically speaking...we did this because we just finished reading about, and discussing, the water cycle, the 3 forms water takes, and the four types of precipitation - rain, hail, sleet, and SNOW.) ;-)

Didn't your Mama ever tell you not to eat snow?! I know your teacher didn't! ;-)

I love this picture of Emma!

Matthew K...were you going to walk home? ;-)

As a "side note", every time we could possibly have some sort of "frozen" precipitation, Mr. Meyerrose blares the song "Let it snow, Let it snow, Let it snow", and has his class sing and dance around the room to it. This is his end of the day "Snow Dance" on those wintry days. Since we are getting so much snow tonight, I guess they finally got the hang of it!

Hat Day for "The Hat"

We did a short author study before Christmas on Jan Brett. Jan Brett is an AWESOME illustrator and author. Some of the books of hers that we read were, The Mitten, Armadillo Rodeo, Goldilocks and the Three Bears, and The Hat. On the day we read The Hat, I thought it would fun if we had a hat day. Below are the kids and some of the crazy hats they wore.

Jan Brett also has an incredible website. Here is the link to her website: www.janbrett.com

Snowflakes

Before Christmas, we made made snowflakes and decorated them with glitter. Very messy, but a lot of creative fun! We then strung them on yarn and then hung them from the ceiling in our classroom. Everyone has been very impressed with how well they turned out. I figure that we can leave them up until at least Spring Break. :)

Here are some pictures of a couple of kids decorating their snowflake. I'm sorry that I don't have pictures of more kids, but I forgot to keep taking pictures of all the groups.

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