Taking off to Australia!

G'Day Mates! Our class officially left for our trip to study Australia. The children gathered their suitcases, packing lists, boarding passes and passports and boarded our imaginary plane for their flight to Sydney. We are so excited to learn all we can about the land down under!

During math, the children worked hard to collect, sort, analyze, and graph data. They gathered data about their wing span and also about their long jump. The children practiced arranging their data from the minimum to the maximum (or vice versa) and they also subtracted these two numbers to find the range of our data set. Finally, the children eliminated the minimum and the maximum until they were left with the median, or middle number. The children were eager to sort themselves by size and figure out who was left in the middle - which is also known one way to find the average! 

It was Lucy's week to shine! We were so happy to welcome Lucy's mom and her older sister to our classroom to celebrate Lucy's star week at school. Lucy demonstrated a really neat experiment for the class that showed the effect of food coloring on a swatch of fabric. Lucy poured more water in one cup than the other cup, but added the same amount of food coloring to each. The children enjoyed predicting what they thought they would see at the end of the experiment. 

Lucy read a cute story called "The Napping House" while her fabric soaked in the colored water. 

Sure enough, after checking in on Lucy's experiment after reading, one of our predictions was correct!  The cloth in the cup that had less water was a deeper shade of blue, because the food coloring was more concentrated. What a fun experiment! 

The children and I agreed that we are so lucky to have such a bright, caring, observant girl in our class this year who is sweet to everyone! You had a terrific week, Lucy!

2-2: A Caring, Cooperative Class!

We had another great week at school! It was packed full of learning and fun!

 During math, the kids spent time collecting data. Using tape measures, the children practiced measuring their wing spans using both inches and centimeters.

 Then, the kids each took turns completing a standing long jump. The children worked in cooperative groups to collect this information. Each person in the group had a role: jumper, marker, line judge, and measurer.  They rotated through each of these positions until everyone had completed two jumps, measured both in inches and in centimeters. They worked wonderfully together as small teams to accomplish this task!

 It was time to spruce up our classroom for Valentine's Day! The children had fun creating little valentine owls with candy heart messages.

 BACK to math... now that we have data collected about our wing spans and our long jumps, it was time for us to analyze the data. We worked to find the median, or average of this information by first SORTING the data from the minimum to the maximum. (See the picture below of the children and their data organized by size :). We then eliminated the minimum and the maximum from each side until we were left with the median in the middle!

 Another dose of fun... Mark selected a dance party from the treasure chest after completing his incentive chart this week! The kids enjoyed getting their blood pumping during this little break from our learning!

Our Valentine celebration arrived! The kids were so excited for their party on Friday afternoon. They started off by decorating large envelopes to collect their valentines in for the party.

 Mrs. Moreth challenged the children's estimating skills by having them guess how many chocolate hearts she was holding!

 Mrs. Ninness helped the children prepare Valentine bingo game boards to play with.

 The children had delicious cupcakes, grapes, juice and water during the party.

 There were a lot of pink faces and hands at the end of the party!

 Our last fun event of the week was Kelly's star student presentation! We were so happy to welcome Kelly's mom, dad, her older sister Annie and her friend Alex into our classroom to celebrate Kelly with us. Kelly started off with a really interesting experiment using shaving cream and food coloring that showed us how clouds get heavy with moisture when it rains.

 Then, Kelly shared a story with the class that she selected herself! She read "Snowmen All Year" to her classmates!

 A picture of the happy Ninness family, +Alex! Such beautiful, happy smiles!

We are so lucky to have such a bright ray of sunshine in our class this year! Kelly is sweet, hardworking, and caring girl. We are so fortunate that she is in our class!!

A Whirlwind of a Week!

Our days in 2nd grade are full and contain so many opportunities for the children to learn in different ways. Read on to learn more about the ways the children spent their time at school this week!

1) Book Fair
The children were so excited to browse the shelves of the book fair this week at school.  I was so pleased to see their excitement for books and eagerness to choose some fun new reading material!

2) Small Guided Reading Groups
Our small guided reading groups continue to meet to build upon decoding and comprehension skills.

3) Whole Group
Our whole group story this week was Nutik, the Wolf Pup. This story lent itself nicely to the concept of making inferences while reading. The children practiced mixing information that they read, with information that they know to come up with new understanding in the text that remains unsaid. They did a terrific job!

4) Text Talk
Our story this week was the Princess and the Pizza! It was a cute story about an ex-princess who was interested in getting back into the princess game. Robust vocabulary words we practiced this week were:                                                                 fragrant

gracious

humble

muttered

fret

practical

5) Cursive
The children are plugging away at their lowercase letters! They are remembering to sit tall in their chairs, slant their papers, and hold their work down with their guide hand! They also promised me they wouldn't go ahead! :)

6) LMC
We missed our library time on Monday due to the snow day from school. We rescheduled our book check-out time for Wednesday, and we popped into the LMC for a little lesson using the iPads on Friday morning. Using the app "nearpod" the children were able to think about a question together, and then come up with an answer to display on the projection screen for everyone to consider. It was so much fun to see ALL of the children engaged, as well as the clever ideas they came up with - all to the same question. We will have to try this again in our classroom!

7) Math
The children worked hard to strengthen their number sense this week. We counted in uncommon patterns (other than 2, 5, and 10 :) and looked for patterns. We practiced adding in sets- more beginning multiplication! Finally, we worked to add two digit numbers together. The key to this lesson was to add numbers together first that make a ten. The rest was a breeze!

8) Science
We wrapped up our rock unit by creating our very own "fossils" using playdoh! Pressing a small dinosaur figure into playdoh allowed us to envision how mold fossils formed long ago. The children took notes and summarized the key rock concepts we learned over the last month in the back of their science notebooks. They took their assessment on Friday and now we are excited to look ahead to our next unit, a social studies unit on Australia!

9) High Tech High Touch returns! They had a few more explorations for the children about fossils that we didn't have time for, so they came back!

10) Germs!
I came across an interesting experiment that the children and I completed together. It was about germs and how even though we can't always see them, THEY'RE THERE! We used 3 pieces of bread. One was the control group and remained untouched. The second piece of bread we passed around the room for all 19 sets of little hands to touch.  The last piece of bread was also passed around the classroom, but this time the children cleaned their hands with hand sanitizer first. All three of these pieces of bread are in a sealed zip-loc bag. We are hopefully going to see just how important it is to wash our hands!

Coming up:
* Our Social Studies unit is up next! We will be learning about the history and culture of Australia!
* Our Valentine's Day Party, Friday February 13th from 1:15-1:50
* No School on Monday February 16. Happy Presidents' Day!