Have you heard the news?!

We’re getting ready to MOOOOVE!

I guess you’ve heard about our new semester beginning in our BRAND NEW school building. Of course we’re excited! It will be fun to have our own space, and have new classrooms, a new library and gym! It will be a new adventure! It will also be bittersweet. Mrs. Vaughan and my class get along so well, and some students have been friends for many years. It will be an adjustment to have a class that we’ve grown accustomed to with 37 little bodies reduced by half! My class will seem small in comparison. Mrs. Vaughan and I really do enjoy teaching all the students. We all seem to have become a team of superheroes. More than once other teachers have complimented our classes on being superheroes. The students have shown it! Mrs. Vaughan and I hope to coordinate activities that we’ll still do together. But once we start in January, we’ll be getting used to just being with our class.

Dr. Brooks, Mrs. Sims, the custodial staff, and the administration have been working tirelessly on a plan for a seamless and stress-free move in plan that we’ll go over soon. We hope to be moved in by the last day of the semester in December.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to explore the world within our classroom at the temporary location.

We are currently loving our study in nonfiction—there is so much information for a second grader to learn: their natural wonder brings the content alive. (Do you remember what it felt like to learn something for the first time and be amazed?) Part of what makes our job as teachers so fun is to introduce our students to concepts they’re never learned before.

For their research papers, the students have checked out many different books: from bats, to geckos, to outer space satellites. They are researching and taking notes as they write about their topics. (Please see the attached links that they can use for research at home.) We are looking forward to some fun informational pieces of writing!

Students have also been interested to learn about authority and the officials in our government. They were interested to find out that Mayor Earl Niven of Chelsea has an initiative to build a brand new sports complex for the growing population of kids in our city. They also learned that Governor Robert Bentley and his wife are pushing for more jobs for Alabamians and support adoption, as they’ve adopted two of their four children. Lastly, they are learning about our President, Barack Obama.

Currently, the students are learning about the voting process, and will be holding a class election to learn about the way we vote in America. Then, on November 19, we’ll have our FIELD TRIP to American Village to step back into time at the historical site in Montevallo. It’ll definitely be an exciting (and busy) two months!