January has already been full of learning! We start math lessons with a math warm-up call Sprint! Sprints are 90 second math equations that teach students to look for patterns. Students race themselves to answer as many equations as possible.

January is a special month for students because it is the month they get to bring a Show & Tell item of their choice to school. Items can be from the Christmas holiday or anything they want to share with the class. Show & Tell might seem like it is just for fun, but this activity requires a speaking voice, eye contact, and the ability to process and answer questions. Students truly enjoyed sharing and listening to their peers.

The first Chapel in January was also exciting. Second grade students received awards for work they completed in art class with Mrs. McCarly. Their work was entered in the DAR art and essay competition.

Second graders read The Stranger and the Soup and learned the valuable lesson of sharing what you have with others can be very fulfilling. Our story taught the students that even small contributions can lead to large and meaningful events. We each brought what we could and ended the morning with a feast of delicious soup and butter bread.

Almost every student tried the soup, most of them liked the soup and some even had seconds! Second grade is so fun at St. James Day School!

Second grade ended the 2022 year with lots of learning, projects, and fun! Students studied Ancient Greek civilizations throughout November and December. As a culmination to their learning, each student completed a research project covering one famous philosopher, one Greek invention, one of the 12 Olympian gods, and a Greek structure. They all did an amazing job and worked so hard on their presentations. We invited parents and the SJDS community to our presentations and each student gave their presentation to various audiences. Project based learning is rich in problem solving, team work, public speaking, collaboration and so much more.

Our next December adventure was Candlelight. This service marks the beginning of the Christmas season and is a beautiful celebratory performance given by the Lower School students. The Lower School body begins practicing for this night at the beginning of the school year and their hard word always pays off. Candlelight is such a special treat to attend. Lesson Readers are chosen from each grade level and everyone read beautifully. Second grade is very proud of our readers this year!

To end this first half of the school year, we had a pancake and pajama party on the last day before Christmas break. Students wore their pajamas to school and I cooked them a pancake breakfast. It was the perfect way to start our Christmas party festivities.

We ended our Christmas PJ Party with an ornament exchange. The class sat in a circle and we rolled dice with special instructions to exchange the ornaments. When everyone had a turn, we opened our ornaments! This was very fun for the kids and they were all so happy!

Every year at St. James Day School each class is challenged to make a difference in our community. This year second grade sold coffee to our campus community to raise money for our project. The students worked together to create advertising posters and made a list of the items we needed. Each morning for one week students met at the school early to set up our coffee station and sold coffee to parents and staff. We were able to raise over $800. Our classroom was blown away by the generosity of our campus family. The money raised was used to spruce up the flowers beds and repair a damaged fence at For the Sake of One, a local foster care non-profit.

Students meet early one morning to pull weeds and plant flowers in the flower beds at For the Sake of One. Thank you to the parents that we’re able to help with this project!

After the fence repair and flower planting, our class had enough money left over to purchase treat bags for the 67 case workers that serve the Texarkana, AR and Texarkana, TX areas. We gave each case worker a Starbucks gift card and a few treats to carry in their cars as they drive long distances and work long hours. This community service project was a joy so complete. We are so grateful for the help and donations we received and the life lessons we learned along the way.

The past two weeks in second grade have been filled with learning in the most fun ways. We wrote our first opinion pieces about the best food in the world. These second graders have great taste in food! We used a graphic organizer called the “TREE Model”. T = Topic sentence, R = Reason for your opinion, and the E = Explanations and Ending sentence. This writing piece will be used at the end of the year with our final writing pieces to show all the growth we will have.

Tactile Tubs are still a huge hit for second graders each morning. Now that we are deep into our learning, schedule and routines, we have implemented familiar reading tubs into our morning fun. Before a tactile tub can be chosen students have to read from their familiar reading tub for 5 minutes. They have learned to quickly tell time to with the minute hand and are reading 2/3 books before we start our day.

We have experienced the beautiful fall weather during recess this week. St. James Day School playgrounds offer many different play experiences.

Recently we have studied early Asian civilizations and read a folktale about a magic paintbrush. We used our artistic abilities to paint what we would want to come to life if we had a magic paintbrush.

Investigations in science included how heat and light energy can change the way things appear. We left butter in the sun for 20 minutes and recorded the changes we saw from heat energy. We also tried to guess the color of construction paper with the absence of light energy.

Do you know how many ten dollar bills are in $1,000? We do! Second graders used words, drawings, and numbers to solve this problem.

Second graders were invited to Middle School to view their Renaissance Era Presentations. We learned all about the caravel, a small ship from the 15th-17th centuries, the Sistine Chapel’s ceiling, and Da Vinci’s inventions. Did you know your arm span is almost the same number of inches as your body’s height?

Second graders put their sense of taste to the test when trying three different kinds of juice without using their sense of sight or smell. Let’s just say, grape juice sounds better than it tastes and we won’t be tasting juice any time soon.

Small group learning is a huge part of our classroom environment in second grade. You’ll hear second graders talk about math and reading groups on a daily basis. This time during the day is used to hone in on specific learning topics, application of what we know, and intervention of skills that are tough. Small groups are my favorite time of the day because we get to have all the fun with manipulatives and different learning styles tailored to each students needs. Saint James is the place to be!