- Our upcoming lessons in science focus on ways we can help our earth. One way is to learn about an Endangered Animal! To tie in with our lessons at school, the children have the opportunity to participate in our final optional Challenge Project of the school year! Their mission is to choose an endangered animal, research it, and create a visual project informing us why it is in trouble and what we can do to help. Project contracts are due on Monday April 11th, and the projects themselves will be due Monday, April 25th. (It will be a fun additional challenge to locate the animals the children studied while we are at the Brookfield Zoo during the week of presentations!)
- Zoo permission slips are due on Friday, April 15th! We have about 90% of them back already! Thank you for such a speedy response!
- The children participated in our annual “Bus Evacuation” practice this week. They learned about bus safety and what to do in case of an emergency on the bus.
- The children enjoyed meeting Ms. Younan, our Junior Achievement representative this week! The children identified various businesses in a community and had fun “highlighting” these places with stickers on a supersized map. Coming up next week is our lesson on unit production vs. assembly line production. The children will be racing to see which way allows them to create the most (paper) donuts. The children will have an opportunity to have a donut hole at the end of the lesson on Tuesday as stated in a note I sent home on Friday. Please let me know if you would not like your child to participate in this portion of the lesson!
- I heard there was a great turnout for the 2nd Grade Book Club! 40 second graders have signed up! Book Club begins this coming Wednesday during the lunch hour. How exciting!
This week our focus was on words with the /oy/ sound, spelled ‘oi’ and ‘oy.” Next week, the children will practice words with schwa sound, spelled often with /a/.
Our theme this week was performing! We read several plays over the course of the week. To kick off the week, the children listened a story called, “La Cucarachita Martina Gets Married.” You would have enjoyed our pre-reading discussion about how you find someone to marry! The oral vocabulary words the children learned were: depart, exaggerate, gesture, attractive, and soothing. We went on to our main selection which was a play called, “Pushing Up the Sky.” It’s a play that begins long ago when the sky was too close to Earth. This was the problem in the story. Tall people kept bumping their heads on the sky! Arrows got stuck in the sky, and children got lost in the sky. We learned that most stories start with a problem and end with a solution. We practiced identifying the problem and solution while reading this week, as well as visualizing the events in the story. New vocabulary words include: agreed, gathered, jabbing, randomly, and signal. We noticed that several of these words have inflected endings, including ‘ed,’ and ‘ing.’
Grammar
The children worked this week on the pronouns I/me, and we/us. They learned that the pronouns I and we are typically used as the subject of the sentence, while the pronouns me and us are used in the predicate!
Math
We looked carefully at a ruler and counted the segments in between the inch marks. The children labeled these sections, for example: 1/8 of an inch, 1/16 of an inch, 1/10 of a centimeter. They practiced measuring to the nearest half-inch and half-centimeter. The children explored the concept of perimeter. They measured the length of the sides of a variety of shapes and added them together to find the distance around it. (The children applied this skill as they found the perimeter of their spelling words on grid paper during the week, too!) We started our talk about capacity, area, and ways to measure them. To illustrate volume, we created cylinders from identical sheets of paper, but one was tall and narrow, and the other was short and wide. We used macaroni noodles to compare how much each cylinder holds. We found out that even when we used the same size paper to make our cylinders, the short and wide cylinder held more than the tall and skinny one! We also traced different objects, such as a deck of cards, and estimated the area using centimeter and inch measurements.
Science
As we brought our Motion unit to a close, the children had fun with two final explorations. During the first, we looked at the bottom of our shoes. Several students who had different types of shoes on came up to volunteer in our “shoe race.” With a table slanted downward, we had a series of races with our shoes down the table. We found that the shoes with a smooth/flat bottom (ex: Annie’s shoe!) flew down the ramp at a quicker rate due to less friction. The shoes with a textured bottom that have grooves (Brooke’s shoe, Michael R’s shoe) either moved slowly, or didn’t move at all due to the friction (traction) between the shoe and the table. Our second exploration had us thinking about the rate of speed at which objects drop. Using sand as a landing pad, we dropped two marbles of different materials (cork, glass, metal) simultaneously. After several repetitions, the children agreed that the balls –regardless of their material- dropped at the same rate! We also noticed that the heavier ball made a deeper imprint in the sand. The children took their Motion assessment on Friday.
Up Next- a series of lessons on Saving the Earth! Don’t forget to set aside a clean and empty milk jug for our upcoming project. Thank you!
Have a wonderful weekend!
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