January 6th Lab Time

I had great intentions before Christmas Vacation. I was going to have the kids reflect on December learning. I was going to have them think about what was the most memorable for them. I was even going to have them write about it in their writer's notebook. I never did any of those! time always gets away from us during those last few days.
I was a bit worried about what kind of writing we'd get today because they've been "removed" from December and school for several weeks. Second graders tend to focus on the here and now. Well, I was pleasantly surprised. We didn't even have time to do any prewriting (just prethinking). So I have everyone sit and think about 10 minutes before we went to lab about what they planned to write in their December timeline. 13 (out of 16 present today) kids raised their hands and said they already knew what they wanted to write about. Wow. The other three said they'd think about it on the walk down. I know, that's not really the best prewriting strategy, but each month, they have approached the writing in a different way, so I was interested to see what they'd produce.
Most chose to write about our last days of school: Polar Express day-complete with PJ's and hot cocoa, some wrote about frosting gingerbread cookies to go along with what they learned about Germany. Several wrote about our country tasting party. And some I didn't even get to check in with.
What I noticed today was kids are very intimidated by the squiggly read lines under their words. Now that they know what it means, they want EVERY word to be spelled correctly and they are constantly raising their hands to ask how to spell this or that. I've already had the discussion that they should look closer at the word and see if they can try spelling it a different way, then try it out and move on. They are not happy with that answer! I intend to do a lesson during lab time next week more specifically on misspelled words on the computer. The other issue I ran into today was the week before vacation, I taught them how to change their font size (because of a project we were doing), font, and color. Now they all had to play with that with their timeline, which I don't mind, but I had to keep reminding them to focus on their writing first, then play with the fonts after. It made me think of how we work as adults. I know sometimes, I like to play around with the font before I create something so I can see what it will look like while I work on it. As the newness wears off, this may not be such a distraction for them.
As far as technological problems, the computers were running very slowly. Again this doesn't seem to be an issue with my kids yet as they are not able to type very fast. The other problem was that most of them forget they needed to save to their folder before they could type. This was their failure to listen to me when I refreshed their memories using the DLP to model the process again.
Today I was happy when:
Kids wrote the while time, they were curious about spelling, they kept their index fingers on f and j (not all of them, but many!), they used one space between words instead of 12!, they used punctuation at the end of their sentences, some even used internal punctuation (Ana used parentheses correctly)!! Overall, it was a good day in the computer lab.