Wednesday

Our day in a nutshell:

• Fossils Tell of Long Ago by Aliki
• Dates and Figs - Mark brought in a special treat for the class. Last week we read a story called Ant and the Three Figs. We were discussing what figs were which related to prunes and other dried fruits such as dates. Well, lucky for us, Mark's family was generous enough to share some special fruits with all of us! You may have some kids asking for new foods at home soon!

• Word Study Notebook-We are recording our spelling words according to spelling rule in our purple W. S. notebooks.
  
• Changes Book-We met some men testing our smoke alarms today. We will add them to our "Contributions" page in our Changes books. We will also continue to add the many people we have met this week such as parent volunteers, Nurse Hoagland, and Mrs. Jackson, our Middle School administrative assistant. We visited the School Clothing Exchange this week as well as our Pop Can Tab collection house which raises money for Ronald McDonald House.
  
• Estimating and comparing numbers
  
• Writing Journal #1-We did some very happy writing about, what else? Things that make us supremely happy.
  
• Adjectives!
• President Obama's Speech and a discussion of what interesting things he had to say: We thought President Obama was funny when he shared this story of his mother: "...she decided to teach me extra lessons herself, Monday through Friday – at 4:30 in the morning.
  Now I wasn’t too happy about getting up that early. A lot of times, I’d fall asleep right there at the kitchen table. But whenever I’d complain, my mother would just give me one of those looks and say, 'This is no picnic for me either, buster.'" We really liked how Mr. Obama said, "If you get in trouble, that doesn’t mean you’re a troublemaker, it means you need to try harder to behave. If you get a bad grade, that doesn’t mean you’re stupid, it just means you need to spend more time studying." That made many of us feel good. "It's like he understands what we feel 'cause sometimes we think we are not good at some things." And we also empathized with President Obama when he said, "My father left my family when I was two years old, and I was raised by a single mother who struggled at times to pay the bills and wasn’t always able to give us things the other kids had. There were times when I missed having a father in my life. There were times when I was lonely and felt like I didn’t fit in." We miss people too. We'd like more time with family. And we sometimes feel like we don't fit in, "but mostly we do." (Thank goodness for second grade optimism.)