The boy is back

My 8th grade son is back from his DC trip! It was hard having my baby fly across the country and be away for 6 days. Luckily the government was back to work in time for all his tours!

 We finished up our bat unit using my Bat Informative Reading and Writing packet. The students loved it! I focused more on nonfiction text features this year. After teaching the features, I let the class go through our nonfiction books armed with sticky notes looking for text features to label. You would think I was giving away candy, they were so excited for their chance to use the sticky notes

craft by Cupcake

We read Where's My Mummy and wrote about what our "mummy" does when we are scared.

We read Spookley the Square Pumpkin and then made our own original pumpkins.

My second graders made a jack-o-lantern and wrote a narrative about it.

I love having a bulletin board by the door. The kids often stop and read each other's work which I think is pretty adorable.  It is such a small school they know the kids in the other grade and seem to enjoy sharing a board.

I started teaching the 2nd graders cursive this week. I guess my school used to have first graders learn cursive. Can you believe that? The Spalding program we use has different cursive so I can't use any of the fonts I have. I miss the curls and tilt to be honest. Spalding looks so boring though I can see that it is probably easier for the kids.  I made my own font but it is tricky getting the letters to link nicely. Anyone ever make a cursive font and have any tips for this? I broke down and wrote lessons by hand. I feel like I am back in the dark ages. LOL.  Here is a screen shot of the font I made. My handwriting is usually better but I have to slow down and be so careful to make it the "Spalding" way.

I do really like the Spalding phonograms though. It is what I was doing but MUCH more in depth.  I'll post more about that another time. My bed is calling me.