The Pioneer Woman Came to Town

On Wednesday night I went downtown and met blogger, home cook, photographer, and author Ree Drummond.  In case she is new to you Ree Drummond is featured on Food Network weekly and has written several cook books.  But the real reason I was excited to see her was because she wrote some of my students favorite picture books.  Charlie the Ranch Dog and Charlie Goes to School are two of our favorite read alouds.

My sweet husband drove me and then stood outside with me in the rain.  In the cold.  For over an hour.

 He told me not to post this picture but I couldn't resist.  Look how cute he is in the freezing cold rain.  I had never been to a book signing before but he heard she was coming to town and I was totally game.

See the people behind me?  That is the book store she was signing at and it is FULL of people.  By the time it was all said and done there were at least 700 people that come through their doors.

This was her amazing cookbook that she was promoting.  Thanks to Ree I now have the details to Thanksgiving all worked out.  

She is VERY friendly and seemed to want to talk.  So I did.

And did.

And talked some more.

It was like a real conversation.  

With a real celebrity!

That's us.  Super exciting!

(Thanks Tim for finding me someone famous to rub elbows with.  I know its not like being in the bathroom next to Kevin Bacon but it's still amazing.)

The Mayflower Experience

I was so lucky that I found The Thanksgiving Story unit written by Monica Schroeder.  You can find it on TPT here.  She takes a long story about the voyage the pilgrims made to America and has the students act it out.  My kids had a blast a you can tell by the smiles on their faces.  I think they still like to wear the paper hats like last year in first grade. (I had many of them last year when I taught first grade.)   I thought they would be past that but they still love it.  

The students broke into teams to get on their ship to America.  Then the Speedwell sprung a leak and they had to return to England.  They loved looking on the back of their ticket to see if they were going to America or staying in England.  It was a surprise for all what they would do next.  I can't say any more about the day without giving it all away. You should really look at Monica Schroeder's project it is great.

Here they are signing the Speedwell log book to get on the ship.

Here are the members of the Mayflower completing their reflections about the experience.

The Speedwell didn't make it to America but their crew had a lot to share about the trip.

Deep in thought.  Right?

Lemonade Economics

For the last few weeks my students have been working on economic concepts. The students created their own company for our town.  We  talked a lot about what we need to make our community successful.  We also used those businesses to learn about goods and services, consumers and producers, opportunity costs, etc.  Then the students broke into business teams to build a lemonade stand.  I used the formate from the blogger at One Extra Degree.  You can get it here.  

I didn't get pictures at the beginning of the unit butI did get some of the signs they made to promote their lemonade stand when they made their advertisement.

After they worked on their signs the students made a commercial to sell their lemonade.  They worked really hard and not one student was disappointed in their commercial.  

Understanding our Country, in Second Grade

In our school district second graders need to learn about democracy and voting so I had the students break into expert groups to learn about the voting process and democracy in our community.

First they got into small groups to read the books I provided them.  All the books were nonfiction and had specific sections students needed to focus on when reading.  

After they finished reading they needed to create a poster with the main ideas from their book.  All posters included examples of democracy, the aspect of government covered, and how it affected our community.

The kids loved working in teams and getting to present their findings was a good culmination for the week.