Soaring in Second Grade with Mrs. Madden: GRIT

October and November so far have proven to be very busy and an exciting time in our classroom.
Please take a glimpse of how we show ...
                                          Guts
                                Resilience
                                      Innovation
                                         Teamwork... in our work!

Dr. O'Mara shared a passage from his book to help us understand how descriptive writing helps the reader "visualize" or see the action in a story. We practiced using visualization in our own writing and we learned how important it is to add strong descriptions to make our writing easier to "see."

Kristina is exuberant as we practiced our song Never Give Up by Bruno Mars!

All second graders learned the words to Never Give Up by Bruno Mars and practiced, practiced and practiced until we knew the words by heart, that took RESILIENCE. Once we felt comfortable with the lyrics we sang them in front of the whole school during an All-School Assembly to show we had GUTS and demonstrated TEAMWORK! We were very proud of our INNOVATIVE idea to show we use GRIT at Steward School.

Great TEAMWORK boys and girls!

The children worked hard and enjoyed every moment of our recent Walk-a-thon. We walked around the playground many times, and as you can see we felt proud for each stamp we received. Our school earned five extra minutes of recess and some new equipment for our playground. A special thank you to the Playground Committee for supporting our school, your idea or INNOVATION helped us to raise money for the playground and we love the new soccer balls, buckets of chalk, kick balls and jump ropes that were graciously donated to Steward School.

We showed resilience to find every single error...we never gave up!

Working as a team to show our best thinking.

It takes resilience to find all the errors on these sentence strips, but working together as team makes it so much easier. We focused on capitalization rules and using our most British voice stated..."It is PROPER to capitalize all PROPER NOUNS."

Using RAz Kids is an INNOVATIVE idea to practice using our comprehension strategies.

We love using RAZ Kids and the iPads are so much fun to use as we read both fiction and nonfiction texts. Many students brought in their own headphones, it was so quiet you could hear a pin drop as they selected reading passages at their reading level, answered comprehension questions and even recorded their own voices as they read each book.

MacLean and Janey demonstrated persistence and RESILIENCE as they pounded their leaves.

We BLASTED all the chlorophyll from the chloroplast cells in the underside of our leaves, we demonstrated TEAMWORK and RESILIENCE, but are so proud of our hard work. We shared our INNOVATIVE idea to prove that even though the autumn leaves had changed color, their food or chlorophyll was still green.