Welcome to Our New Blogging Buddies

We are very excited to be joining in with the Primary Blogging Community this week! Students will see how we use our blogs to communicate about our class, our learning, our celebrations and our growth. This is another way we can connect to a global community and we find that very exciting!

We want to tell you a little about our class and our community. Our school is called Lecanto Primary, and our mascot is the panther. We have 18 2nd graders in Lecanto, Florida. Lecanto is a rural area. We are about 30 minutes from the Gulf Coast, and about an hour north of Tampa.

We see ourselves as connected learners. We use twitter, Skype, Google Hangouts and now blogging to collaborate and communicate with learners around the world! Right now we are involved in three twitter chats or projects. We actually host two of them! We are signed up to do even more!

One is called #k2tweetpals. We just started two weeks ago. Each week we post two questions and primary students around the world post their answers throughout the week. We would love for you to join us!

We also host #mtgr2 ! That is a math talk slow chat. We post one question on Sunday evenings, and then students post their math talk throughout the week.

We just joined in with other 2nd grade classes in other math tasks that post every day. That chat is #gmttc2 You can join any of these chats any time!

We also love to Skype and use Google Hangouts to meet other classes and experts! We were even in the newspaper last week. The article talked about our Skype with South Africa. We do reader's theater on Skype, Mystery Number and Mystery Location.

We also love to read, write and do many other things in our classroom. We just started doing something called Hour of Empower. That is a lot of fun!  We will be doing the Global Read Aloud, will you? Which books are you reading?

We can't wait to hear more about you and your classroom. We also look forward to reading your comments and commenting on your blogs over the next few weeks.

Our Classroom

Last week we went swimming!

Welcome Primary Blogging Community

We are excited to connect with other bloggers in the next few weeks. It will be fun to see what others are writing on their blog and see who our readers are.

We welcome our new friends and hope you enjoy getting to know us. Our school is Lecanto Primary School and we are located in Lecanto, Florida. We have 19 first graders in our class.

We are very busy in the next several weeks and working on collaborating with many people outside our area through the internet. We are a part of the Primary Blogging community and are excited to learn more about commenting on blogs.

We are also a class that tweets. You can follow us at @FirstatBatters on twitter. There we will be posting with our first grade pals using #1tweetpals. This is something we have been working on for about 4 weeks.

This week we are also starting some work with the Global Read Aloud project. We are studying the works of Peter Reynolds and learning more about him as a writer. We are also starting a new chapter book called The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane by Kate DiCamillo. This is also a part of the global read aloud project. At the end of the week we will have our first google hangout and do a Reader's Theater with two other first grade classrooms; one is in Iowa and the other Canada!

These are busy and exciting times. We will have plenty to share with you on our blogs. We are excited to learn and grow with you!