More December celebrations!

We made ice castles with marshmallows, frosting, and lots and lots of candy. Here are some photos of the students having fun making their creations .

Thank you to Mrs. Cowan and my daughters Catie and Molly who were finished college for helping prepare the candy and wrap the final masterpieces. Thank you also to all the families that donated candy to make this holiday activity so successful.

 If you would like to see the individual ice castles, head over to the student work page.

We were proud to have another student, Carter, become an Xtramath Superstar by completing his addition facts and moving on to subtraction!

Carter is a whiz at math!

We also celebrated good behavior with our lunch bunch!

Measuring Penguins….and Second Graders!

The second graders at Brookside integrated our study of living animals in science with measurement in math in December when they measured and drew penguins. The students were randomly assigned a type of penguin and they had to read a chart to learn the height of that species. Then they measured, drew, colored and cut their penguins which became part of a rookery in the C-Wing Hallway. Here are some photos of the students in the process of making their penguins. You can see individual photos of the students holding their penguins on the student work page. Thank you to Mrs. Anello for helping cut all those large sheets of paper!

Miranda starts drawing her penguin while Uriah is cutting his penguin.

The students needed lots of space to create their penguins. These children found a good spot to work near the cubbies.

Students who had smaller penguins chose to work with their desks like Alec.

The halls were filled with hard working second graders that afternoon.

Penguins, penguins being made everywhere….even at the top of the stairs.

Making penguins near our rainbow rug.

Measuring to make sure they are the right size!

Lots of hands on measuring happening here


The students also measured their own heights and then we plotted the heights on a line plot. Here are just a few of the students being measured with our giant measuring tape on the rug.