Thank You

I wanted to extend a warm thank you to all of those who have been faithful followers of our blog this school year. My intentions were to provide families with an interactive view into our classroom. Many of the posts on this blog were entered or helped along by your children. It is a great experience to see them grow as learners not only in the classroom subjects but as digital learners. I hope that in the future they have the experiences to become literate with all different things, as the definitions are always changing. As this is my first time running a classroom blog, I have learned almost as much as I hope your children have. This was a great experience for us to learn together. Feel free to comment or drop an email to me if you have any questions or concerns!

Mrs. D :)

Games We Play

I try to make the classroom a little bit more exciting than is done traditionally. In science we're learning about how to classify animals into different categories. I decided it would be fun to help the students exercise this skill by having them play detective. This video is only one of the few that I have created for us to play during science time in our class. Here is an example:


See if you can have your student create some ideas for you to be the detective!

Symbols of Peace

One of our social studies units focuses on peace. We have been talking about the word peace and what it means to us. We will eventaully be extending this conversation to a more broad topic and covering what peace means throughout the world. We read a book entitled Peace Begins With You, by Katherine Scholes. After reading this book we went to the computer lab for the students to create their own representations of what peace is. We compiled our digital images into a storyboard in which the students recorded their voices telling their message of what they think peace is. Here is the video for you to enjoy.

What Are We Doing in Class?

We have been learning a lot about writing throughout the school year. Our students had the luck of experiencing new art skills with their art teacher the other day. They created art to hang on the walls of our classroom community by re-using things that some would consider trash. Because we are focusing on being sustainable, our students were excited that they could create such beautiful things from cardboard boxes and other things that would have otherwise been thrown away. We decided that it would be a good idea to write letters to the art teacher to let her know how appreciative we are. This was a good way to help the students learn to write letters. This is a genre of writing that they're not experienced with. Here are a few examples, you might want to try having your child write a letter at home.

Photos of our Classroom

Today we went around the classroom taking pictures to show off the things we do in our classroom. Here are a few pictures with captions written by the students:

This is where Mrs. D puts all of the things that we are focusing on for class this week.


Every morning when we get here we do weather. Mrs. D has us tell everyone what it is like outside. We count how many days we have been in school too.


This is our reading carpet. We use these books to read to ourselves and practice getting to the next bucket. Once we finish the books in one bucket we can go to the next one.

Welcome to our Classroom

My name is Mrs. Dirla, and I would like to personally welcome you to our virtual second grade classroom. In this blog we will work together as a class to create new posts that are both interesting and educational. The purpose of this blog is to help our students grow in their learning. They will be able to share with you what they have learned in class, as well as create new literacies for themselves by utilizing different technological resources.

Here are a few of the classroom rules that we went over in class today, I would like all of the students to come to class ready to discuss their ideas for more specific rules as sub-categories for these general rules--in other words, what does it mean to:
Be Respectful
Be Ready to Learn
Be Responsible

What is Digital Literacy?

There are many different aspects of digital literacy. I chose to create this blog to represent a way I would incorporate digital literacy in my classroom to aid my students in their future endeavors. Becoming digitally literate is something that is being promoted significantly right now, as it is necessary to move forward in the working world. Companies are offering curriculum and courses to help people further their digital literacy. By using a blog like this in my classroom it will help students gain knowledge and access to things they may not necessarily have if they weren't asked to participate in digital interaction in the classroom.

According to wikipedia, people who are digitally literare are more likely to be financially secure. It is important for our students to have knowledge that will help propel them forward. Although they may just be sharing pictures and videos from their classroom experiences, they will be able to adapt the things they have learned here to their future education and workplaces.