Right, left, right, left.....
Combo Boot Camp, here we go.
Come on y'all get in the flow.
We had the best two days reviewing skills...boot camp style. Prepare for a long post because we have been busy. We started the day with Enlistment. Students learned the commands for the day and reported for duty. We reviewed capitalization rules with a cadence.
Further, we reviewed different punctuation marks needed for the end of sentences. We practiced editing marks by adding proper capitalization and punctuation to sentences.
We further practiced editing skills in four different training stations. At the first, station students had to draw a card and decide the proper ending punctuation for the sentence. If they chose the correct punctuation, they received a point. However, sometimes students got an exercise card instead of a sentence. Students had to do push ups, sit ups, or jumping jacks to earn the point if they drew an exercise card.
A second station was drilling capitalization and punctuation rules using interactive games on the Chromebooks.
2. Zara's Dream
4. Robot Guy
Another station was identifying and sorting common and proper nouns. However, first the students had to run the latter with their word card. They worked so hard.
The last station was sentence drop flight school. Students had to determine if a sentence was complete or incomplete. We reviewed that a complete sentence has to have a subject and an action. Students read a sentence on the board then had to say if it was complete or incomplete. They earned points for correct responses but also had the opportunity to earn bonus points if they could hit the correct answer with their jet.
While the stations were very active by themselves, this is boot camp. We need more movement. Every time a squad finished a station, the students did 90 seconds of exercises. The students were out of breath all morning! Ha! It was okay that we haven't been able to go outside all week, boot camp had the movement handled! Students had to army crawl, run tires, jump on trampolines, do step ups, and more! Hut-Two-Three-Four!
After lunch, more boot camp. This time we looked at the concept of main idea and details. Many of the students have been struggling with this on their RAZ quizzes. To practice main idea, we played a game called "In the Bag." Each student was put in a squad and given a bag of details. The team had to take out the details and list the items. For example, one bag had a TV remote, a DVD, popcorn, candy, and pop. Together, they decided what the topic was and then developed a main idea sentence. In the previous example, the topic might be Movie Night and the main idea sentence might be "Movie night is a great way to relax and spend time with your family. This hands-on activity seemed to make the difference in their understanding. I could see the light bulbs turning on! 
Whoa! I told you this would be a long post. We worked so much in. I haven't even shared the math lesson yet. Here it goes! We took place value to boot camp. In class, we use a manipulative called base ten blocks. Base ten blocks are specifically designed to help children concretely understand place value concepts. The blocks are composed of tiny cubes to represent ones, rods to represent tens, and flats to represent 100. For boot camp, we used human place value blocks to represent tens and ones.
Since our second graders have lots of experience building numbers, they were the leaders in making the numbers that the first graders were practicing. If a student wasn't up in front of the class making numbers, then he/or she was recording numbers on the iPad. First graders were writing the numbers and second graders were keeping a running total. They added together every number made. More amazing learning....just wait until you see day two!
