Crockpot Spice Cake

After many weeks of hard work, today we worked as a team and made a spice cake together in the crockpot!  Everyone had a turn either adding an ingredient or mixing.  The smell was delicious and everyone was excited to try our cake!  I'm happy to report it was delicious!

Here is the recipe:

One box of cake mix

1/2 cup of applesauce

1 1/3 cup of water

3 eggs

Pam spray

Spray the inside of your crockpot with Pam spray.  Combine all the ingredients in a bowl and beat with a mixer for one minute.  Pour the mixture into the crockpot and cook on high for 1 1/2 -2 hours or until done.

Model Class

We had a school wide meeting today and Room 9 was the "model class"!  We demonstrated how to sit criss cross applesauce with a calm listening body!  Look at how amazing we look!

Research with Mrs. Flanagan

A new Common Core skill for second grade is research so every Friday, we have been learning how to do research with Mrs. Flanagan.  We decided to focus on owls for our first topic and we have learned so many amazing facts in just three short weeks!  We have talked about how various nonfiction features like the table of contents, index, glossary, and captions make finding information easier.  Today we talked about "summarizing" the authors message and putting it in our own words.  This is a tough skill that we will continue to work on all year.  In the coming weeks, we will start to do some research online as well as continue to use books.  Here are some photos from today's research session!

ECHO Science Center

We had a great field trip to the ECHO Science Center today! We learned about the animals that inhabit the lake and how they adapt to survive to their environment.  We had a 45 minute presentation on animals, then we broke up into groups and explored the center.  We had a scavenger hunt to keep us busy and we enjoyed lunch with friends. We had an amazing day and learned a lot!

Math lesson with Lori Silvas

We had the pleasure of having Lori Silvas, a math specialist from Stowe, come to our classroom today and teach a math lesson. She talked about finding compliments of 5 and 10 using a ten frame card.  We also worked hard at explaining our thinking out loud. This can be a challenging skill and the kids soon realized that Lori didn't accept, "I just know."  Kids really had to explain the relationship between numbers and how they manipulated numbers to find an answer.  We played a fun game called "Shut The Box" using ten frame cards, but you can also play with a regular deck of cards.  All you need are numbers 1-9 and two dice. Ask your child how to play! They had a lot of fun!