Mrs. Frey's Classroom

Hello! Just a reminder that Z and I will be at Fox Creek today from 10am-noon if anyone wants to meet up with us! Looking forward to seeing you! 😄

Hi Families!! Can you believe how fast the summer has gone?!

I am sure missing you all and would love to do a meet up at Fox Creek park in a couple weeks! I am currently looking at Friday, July 26th around 10am. I will likely pack lunch for my daughter and spend a couple hours at the park and splash pad with her. If any of you are available that day and would like to meet up with us, we would LOVE to see you and catch up on your summer!

Please pass this along to anyone from our class that may not see this post! I hope to see many of you! 😁

Also, if your child would like to come, but they are in need of a ride or someone to walk with, let me know in the comments and I will talk to you about some options!

*If weather prevents us from meeting on this date, there will be another date scheduled for early August!

Last Day of 2nd Grade 🫶🏼

At the start of the year our district themed the year, “Hey, Joy.” As a school we then had the opportunity to define the word joy as a part of PD. Here’s how I chose to define joy:

“Happiness in the moment, in the remembering and in the anticipation that brings an involuntary smile.”

We were then given the opportunity to write why we are educators and why the role is important to us. Here’s what I wrote:

“I am an educator and this role is important to me because…
-I get to love and care for children.
-I get to watch children learn, grow and discover each day.
-I get to create spontaneously and with intention.
-I get to impact lives every day.
-I get to be a small part of children’s stories and memories.
-I am impacted every day and changed for the better because of my students.”

While this year chapter of my life comes to a close for now, I can’t help but recognize all the students and families that have crossed my path and brought immense JOY. You did, and you continue to bring an involuntary smile to my face when I remember all the memories we made together in Room 107. I am forever grateful and forever changed because of each of you. THANK YOU!

Never forget & always remember, You are SO LOVED,
Mrs. Frey 🫶🏼

Day 3 & 2 of our countdown to summer!

Mr. Frey surprised myself and our staff with cold brew coffee from Northern Vessel and it was a hit! As if I wasn’t already emotional- this really got me! His mom also provided a beautiful bouquet from her floral business, Posies! If you haven’t checked out either of those, I highly recommend! 😆

Day 3 highlights: morning meeting outside, bubbles & chalk with our 5th grade buddies, and taking a tour of the 4th grade wax museum!

Day 2 highlights: class photos with everyone ❤️, Peace out activities including friendship bracelets, watercolor butterflies, and some made up projects! A trip to Fox Creek playground (not the splash pad, but Z and I would absolutely meet you all there this summer), and an assembly that caused A LOT of tears for some!

Last Day photos coming! 🥰

Day 5 & 4 of our countdown to summer!

Puff paint pro tip… better to outline the design than spread like water colors for drying purposes! 😅

Lava lamp pro tip… fill mostly with vegetable oil for more bubbles!

Always learning around here 😂

Thank you SO much to all our families that donated materials & got T-shirts for students! And thank you to Deb H (Grant’s mom) for taking the time to help us navigate my wild ideas!!

We are soaking in ALL our moments together as a class family ❤️

Since our field trip our month of May has been full with:
•Playground innovations
•Playing with Mrs. Trader’s chicks
•Enjoying Mr. Owens’ stories about field trips when he was a kid… to his teachers house! Funny enough I also recall a field trip to my teachers home! Anyone else? Times have certainly changed!!
•Reading
•Career presentations
•Acting out or artistically creating vocabulary words
•Playing at recess
•Creating bird feeder prototypes
•Sheltering in the room across the hall… first thing Tuesday morning (crazy)!
•Finding more (unopened) play-doh to play with!
•Sharing our researched career paths!

It’s been a month packed full of review, a bit more learning & a whole lot of fun! Next up, 5 day countdown photos! 😢❤️

Field Trip to Kuehn! We learned so much about Iowa animals and their habitats! A fun-filled, exhausting Monday!! 😁

Families… some photo dumps are coming your way! It’s been a wild month so I have once again not been on social media much.

Let’s kick it off with more from our April shenanigans! 🙃
-Sharing writing pieces with our 5th grade buddies
-Mystery Reader: Mr. Frey
-Joe kicked us off with a month of student readers for closing circle
-Mrs. Frey went on a quick trip to Las Vegas & of course found a connection to our 2nd grade learning with 3D shapes. I was able to show students pictures and a video of the Sphere in LV and let students create their own version of a sphere! Some advertised sports, others made theirs silly or colorful!
-We kicked off our science unit in inquiry stations learning about how plastic impacts our environment. In these stations students read, watch videos, viewed images, created graffiti walls, and created things out of plastic to practice reusing! This has led us into May! 🌸

I cannot believe how quick this school year has gone. I cannot wait to keep making more memories with students these last few weeks! 🥹

Happy World Autism Day! 💙🩵

Thank you to Bria’s mom, Rosemary and sister, Mia for taking today to celebrate with:
💙Pizza & snacks
💙Sensory bottles
💙Coloring pages
💙Books

Thank you to all the families that donated supplies so we could create amazing sensory bottles & eat yummy food!

A fun & FAST week back together!
-We learned about erosion by breaking apart paper as it “went down the river.”
-We learned about and created different types of poetry (& got share out by standing on the low table… this was a hit)!
-We learned a new activity for morning meeting that tied together with our Fairy Tale learning
-We went on a class walk when the weather was nice for some extra movement
-We had a school-wide morning meeting on Friday!

Can’t wait to be back together on Monday! ❤️

Catching up on the last month in 2nd grade!

We’ve changed up our morning meetings a little bit by doing some more “Outside the Box” thinking activities, we’ve had student guest readers and support teachers as guest readers, and some celebrations along the way!

It was so fun to celebrate all the growth made this year with all 22 students and their families at Spring Conferences! I hope you enjoy a relaxing and fun Spring Break! ❤️ See you soon!

Great job 2nd graders!!! I LOVE watching them shine & they shined bright tonight! So proud of you all & cannot wait to talk about all the funny things and favorite parts all day tomorrow!

101 Days Smarter!!! 🖤🤍

We celebrated by:
⚪️Dressing up like Dalmatian puppies
⚫️Watching the story of 101 Dalmatians
⚪️Reading and drawing Dalmatians
⚫️Creating short stories using the word BARK as many times as possible
⚪️Writing our opinion on whether or not dogs should be allowed at school
⚫️Created dog kennels using our classroom materials
⚪️Ended our day with a whole grade level rotation where each teacher planned a different activity!

Woof! These puppies must be exhausted!

We do A LOT of learning each day. It was so fun to use that learning in fun & unique ways today. Also… the puppy outfits 😍😆 sooo cute!

Today we learned about Sundogs in morning meeting, then we created our own version of Sundogs!

I told students that I saw one in Grimes on Sunday and it became my mission to figure out what I was looking at! This activity may have been more exciting for me! 😆

These 2nd graders are SO creative! 🎨

I also attached the photos I showed students for reference if you can’t figure out their drawing! 😂

Happy Winter Break to you all!

We enjoyed a lot of festive activities throughout the week and celebrated winter break with a fort day in our PJ’s!

We also got to enjoy some fun at the winter party with each other.

Thank you all for your generosity & sweet gifts! These children warm my heart… I couldn’t stop telling stories about them when I got home last night ❤️

I can’t wait to see you all again in 2024! ✨

A full week of kicking off new things in every subject!

•Starting learning about traditions & holidays around the world in writing - this will eventually lead into a fun writing project!

•We began more science curriculum this week leaning about properties of materials… apologies for the extra supplies that likely made it home to you! 😆 If you haven’t seen it, check their backpacks!

•We have been learning how to infer unknown words during reading. Friday we got to do a fun activity with inferring what was in each bag based on the clues. Some inferences were spot on, others were a little… 🤔🫣 Don’t worry, all were anonymous!
We get to continue this learning with The Nutcracker books this week to prepare for our field trip on Thursday!!

A fun week ahead this upcoming week! ✨

We packed a lot in two days of school!

🎈Parade Float creations
🎉Parade
🦃Thanksgiving games
… to name a few!

Remember to watch the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade on Thursday! These students could easily enter their floats! ☺️🎈🦃

The last few photos from our field trip + the last two weeks in 2nd grade!

So many fun things going on (see photo captions)! We began our float designs on Friday so students know what they might need to bring with them on Monday for their float. Feel free to use any household items you are wanting to get rid of… no need to purchase anything 😆

Bus ride to the Civic Center this morning! The energy level is BIG & joyful on this fun Friday! More photos to come… 😆 🚌

I didn’t take many pictures last week but students were working hard on their Monarch project to wrap up their learning from that unit. We can’t wait to share these at conferences!

This week…
Monday: We had our Author celebration with Mrs. Jansonius. We sipped (carefully) on juice boxes while we read our classmates stories & gave compliments about their work! We all agreed that it is awesome to receive compliments but it feels good to give them too!

Tuesday: We played a game of Tough Choices for our social studies unit thinking about the goods or services we needed from community producers. We also go to watch our classmate, Sawyer, silly string Mr. Robie and Mr. Owens, then watch other students pie a few GR staff members! I happily cheered on the sideline with the class 😆

Wednesday: We read about saving and spending money with a buddy.

Thursday: We laughed… A LOT (look for the picture with a caption), we made beautiful art during our Art Party, and we all got to enjoy our first round of Interest Groups for the year!

A wonderful week of learning & fun! Enjoy your day off tomorrow and the weekend ahead! I’m already looking forward to the memories we make next week! 🩵

What a week! For some reason it felt longer than normal but maybe because we packed A LOT in!

Tuesday we released our amazing Monarchs into the sky & onward to Mexico, but not before capturing pictures with them ❤️ I plan to print their pictures out on photo paper but if you would like to take your child’s picture from here and save it, go for it! It’s one of the most special memories every year. We even got Mr. Robie to take the photos for us this year and Mr. Owens became one with the butterfly! We found out that we had more male Monarchs than female- next time you see one, check to see if you can find the extra dots on the hind wings (male). 🦋

Students have been working SO hard on their story writing & we finally got to publish our writing! We ended the week by creating our pictures to go along with our stories and got to share them with our Buddies in Mrs. Allison’s 5th grade class! They also got to share their Native American project with us.

A few extra photos you will see- small group work from our reading rotations and pollinator noticings during science. Mrs. Johnson also came in as our Mystery Reader this week & read some funny books in her best accent!! 🙃

I apologize that my newsletter did not go out yesterday via ParentSquare. I believe most of you know, but there have been issues with the site this week and we do not have access to send things to families. I’ll send something as soon as I can!

Have a great weekend! 🎉

Last week week we started off as detectives 🕵️‍♂️ coming up with our own solutions to a heap of problems.

By the end of the week we transformed into pollinators and “sipped nectar” from hand-drawn flowers to experience the power of pollination! 🌺 🦋

We concluded the week with the 8th annual Fun Run & Elaina’a mom as our mystery reader!Thank you to the generous family that gifted everyone in our class a GR sticker! (We had lots of conversations around where we could put our sticker & where we shouldn’t put our sticker 🙃).

I also threw in a picture of myself with other familiar faces from GR from the Iowa BEST conference we got to attend last Thursday! We learned about social emotional health for both staff and students! 💙

Finally catching up from the last two weeks 😆

Two weeks ago- Homecoming week! We had some very fun dress up days and an assembly with NW football players, cheerleaders, the dance team, and marching band.

Students did inquiry stations all week during science to do our own learning about Monarch butterflies! Students also got to explore Peter H. Reynolds books as we participated in an author study with his books all week.

We ended the week with Bria’s mom as our mystery reader! She also talked with us about Bria and how we can best support her, then she hosted our Fall Party! Thank you, Rosemary! We had so much fun having you in our classroom!

Last week we had Mrs. Jansonius joined us every day for writing as we are learning how to create sentences with nouns and verbs, and use our every day experiences to inspire story writing! We ended the week with Camden’s birthday celebration and Mr. Robie as our mystery reader!

Our first lonnnnnng week together, but it was a great one! Did anyone else fall asleep early last night? 😴

Lots of great rotation practice- I’m super impressed with the choices everyone is making to grow themselves as readers, writers, and mathematicians!

On Friday we enjoyed International Dot Day by writing about how we can make our mark in the world and water coloring dots just like the character, Vashti in The Dot by Peter H Reynolds!

We also had an assembly to kick off the Fun Run for this year! Each student should have brought home a letter with their name on it that gives you access online.

I neglected to snap a picture but one of our caterpillars is in its J-formation… likely in a chrysalis by now! We still have other hungry caterpillars so if you find some milkweed this weekend, please send it in so we can keep them fed!

Enjoy your weekend!

What a FAST week! Thank you all for your kindness for my (day after) birthday!! We enjoyed some cupcakes provided by the PTO, I received all the hugs & cards (all week long), & they even sang to me (Mrs. Elston kicked off the singing)!

We watched our caterpillars grow SO big this week, we wrote our first Friday letter to someone at home (remember to respond on the back side ☺️), and today we ended with our very first Mystery Reader… Jayce’s Dad!

We’ve learned a lot of choices these last 3 weeks. I’m excited to launch a more routine practice next week with rotations in full swing.

Remember that we have PICTURE DAY on MONDAY - Don’t forget to send your forms back filled out!

Have a happy weekend, & Go ‘Clones! ❤️💛🖤