I added music computer work stations for tomorrow's computer lab time.  We get to go once a week, and I wanted to tie it in to our study of music this week.  I know we won't have time in class otherwise, because we still have a good bit to cover tomorrow and Friday.  I really love the kid-friendly music websites I found.  They are really neat.  Some of them even let you hear different instruments.  I think it will really help my students identify with the instruments more than just seeing the pictures!  Seeing is believing, but sometimes sound is nice too!

We did get a lot done today, but did not get everything covered that I wanted to.  We had library, and so we did reading work stations, but had to leave out the mystery study and our instrument study.  We will pick up tomorrow, but have computer lab, so that may be our instrument study tomorrow unless I can work it in some other way.  I must say it again...there's just not enough hours in our day! 

I introduced the new website along with the new computer reading and math work stations yesterday.  The kids were sooooooo excited.  They were of course very excited to see their pictures!  They loved the websites too.  Everything went great, but my XTenda doesn't always do as it is suppose to.  So, with the last rotation group, there was a few problems.  I had it planned to reverse rotations today, so that group could enjoy the new websites since they got shorted yesterday.  However, Skip the Magic Guy came today for an assembly. That wiped out our station time.  Five students did get to take advantage of the math stations today though.  I plan to let 5 new students use them each day until everyone gets a chance.  Then I will start again next week with a similar rotation.  Money has proved a challenging concept with my second graders, so I hope if they have a computer at home they are practicing there as well.  Other students worked in partners after our whole group lesson on counting change.   
We continued today with our mystery unit.  We used this website: http://kids.mysterynet.com/ to work on our Case Study today.  We are doing it together so that the students will have an idea of how to do this independently later in the unit.  These mysteries are also great because they are shorter than a mystery book and we can do this in short 20-30 min. increments.  We didn't get finished with the Case Study, but plan to wrap it up in about 5 minutes tomorrow.
We talked about the string instrument family in detail today.  The students enjoyed learning 6 new facts about the strings and comparing the different pictures of the instruments. 
Do you ever feel like there's so much to teach and tell the kids and not enough time to do it in?  I am starting to feel that way more and more.  This is such a smart little class and they love new information!  We are really trying to work on thinking skills. 

I have continued to try and build my website today.  I have worked on Glogster to create a page for the kids to use during morning reading work stations.  Now I just need to create a page for math work stations.

Yesterday I found weebly.com through another website and loved its ease of use and the setup.  It was easy and what I had been looking for.  I can't believe it even includes this blog!  I am so excited.  This is such an easy way to journal and chronicle my teaching ideas and resources on the web.  It along with the new website will allow me to easily share my ideas with other teachers as well.  I spent most of this afternoon uploading photos and organizing the website.  It is a work in progress, but I am proud of what I have accomplished.  I think my students will be excited on Monday as well.  They were dying to see their mystery photos Friday.  I told them I would upload them this weekend.