Christmas visitors...

The last few weeks we have had a few guest readers in our class. We have had the opportunity to have Bro. Jeff Paxton from Dover First Baptist, Bro. Micah Williams from Dover Church of Christ, and Mrs. Taverner the High School Principal. We have loved each and every story! There are still a few readers to go...be sure to watch for pictures!!! :)

Christmas Traditions

This week the whole Second Grade is looking at how Christmas has changed over the years. We have found many traditions that have carried on from the old fashioned Christmases to modern day Christmas today! We are looking at some traditions that are completely different and some traditions that are the same! So here is our questions for you...we are wanting to do some online research through our blog!

1. What is a tradition your family does every year?

2. Do you celebrate Christmas as Christ's birthday or something else?

3. Do you draw people's names for gifts?

4. Do you put up real Christmas tree or an artificial Christmas tree?

5. Do you have a tall or short Christmas tree?

6. Do you wrap your presents with brown paper or colored paper?

We hope you will share some of your family's favorite Christmas traditions!

Very Special Guests

This week we had two very special guests visit our classroom! We loved each of you and are so grateful for these cool experiences!

On Tuesday, Mrs. Brown from the Dover Times had the opportunity to come visit us in our classroom! Coolest experience YET! We had such a good time telling her all about our classroom and our class blog. Ms. Race invited her hoping to get more community involvement in our blog! We are excited to see what comments are to come in our future! Thanks Mrs. Brown...you are pretty awesome!

We had so much to share! 

We made the FRONT PAGE!!!!! 

Next, since we have been talking all about vegetables this week, Mrs. Race, our teacher's mom, brought us some homemade vegetable soup to try! Most of us liked it but some of us weren't too crazy about the vegetables! Thanks Mrs. Race! 

Food

This week we have been reading The Ugly Vegetables. In this story, the little girl tells about her mother growing a garden of Chinese vegetables. The mother then made a soup from the vegetables that supposedly would make your belly laugh it was so good. A few of us have enjoyed different vegetables we have gotten at Mulan's or New China. It makes us wonder if these are the types of Chinese vegetables the mother grew in her garden? So here is something we would like know....

1. What vegetables do you like to eat?

2. Have you ever eaten Chinese vegetables? 

3. Do you think Chinese vegetables are really ugly or did the author exaggerate the title? 

4. Do you have any good recipes for cooking vegetable soups?

We know we are suppose to eat vegetables but...we are wondering where can we find these real Chinese vegetables? Do we just find them at the chinese restaurant or does a grocery store sell these unique vegetables?

The Great Kapok Tree

This week we are looking into why author's write. We have discovered three main reasons: to entertain, to inform, or to persuade. We just finished reading The Great Kapok Tree and discovered that Lynn Cherry wrote to inform us all about what is happening in the rain forest. Did you know that the rain forest is being slowly cut down? So here are looking at ways we can help save the rain forest and our great WORLD!

Pick up litter 
Replant trees once they have been cut down
Recycle paper, bottles, and cans 
keep our yards cleaned up 
Conserve our water
tell people all about the problems in the rain forest 

What can you help us do?

Bats...Bats...BATS

Guess what we are learning about this week....wait for it.......wait for it.....BATS! That is right, we are learning all about those dark, creepy, night time creatures. Well at least that is what everyone thinks about them...our goal this week is to figure out just what bats are up to these days! So here we go again...we have the questions and we are hoping that YOU have the answers! So...

1. Why do some bats eat fruit for dinner?

2. How do bats have babies? 

3. Why are most bats misunderstood today?

4. What is a bat's prey?

5. Do bats have bones?

Now...we only hope you can help us answer these!

Signs of Winter

The Legend of the Persimmon: 

This morning we learned all about the seed of a persimmon. Did you know the seed has helped people determine the outcome for the winter to come. We learned the seed can have 3 different shapes inside.

Fork- The fork represents a mild winter 

Knife-The knife means the winter will be full of ice! 

Spoon- The spoon represents shoveling out lots of SNOW! 

....What did we find this year in our persimmon?.....

You guessed it, we found that this year our persimmon showed a SPOON! We are hoping for lots of snow. We also took the time to see what the Farmer's Almanac said about winter here in Arkansas. Guess what, it completely agreed with our persimmon. So here we go...getting ready for a cold winter to come! BRRRR....

Help us out...if you have cut open a persimmon please share what you found!