Hunting for Minerals

Time seems to be flying by in 2nd grade!  Here is a recap of our week:

1) The children's cursive writing lessons have begun! In order to produce their very best handwriting, please help your child remember to: Sit tall in their chair, slightly slant their paper (the right corner goes up- we are all right-handed this year! :) keep both feet on the floor, and use their left hand as a guide hand to hold their paper flat and steady. Please also remind the children to stay with the pace of the class and not get ahead of us, it will be much easier if we all stay together. Their handwriting is turning out beautifully so far! 

2) The children completed Unit 6 in math. They took their Unit 6 math assessment, as well as the Mid-Year math assessment that touches on many of the skills the children have been working on since August.  We also continue to practice our subtraction facts as well as subtraction with re-grouping as we look ahead to Unit 7. Math Journal #1 went home on Friday. 

3) Our text talk story of the week was "Eat Your Vegetables!" It was about a brontosaurus who was munching happily away on the tree home of a very concerned owl.  Words the children worked on include: ferocious, lumbered, queasy, relocate, collaboration and steadfast. With just a little encouragement the children are very eager to attempt to use these words and add to our running tallies on the board throughout the day. Thank you for keeping an eye on these words at home and helping the children find natural ways to apply them in conversation! 

4) The Whole-Group story we shared this week was a nonfiction text called "Super Storms." We read about all kinds of serious weather storms. The children enjoyed activating their background knowledge of what they already know about storms to help us set the stage for reading. 

5) After working together as a class to write a biography about the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., the children worked to write a biography of their own this week! They selected a notable individual they would like to write about. Then they read a book about this person and followed up using the website ducksters.com to gather additional pieces of information. They took notes using a graphic organizer, and then they assembled their facts into paragraph form. Finally, they children edited their work and shared it with a friend before they published it into a fresh clean final copy. The children are at various stages of the process. It is wonderful to see the independence and confidence the children are showing as they work through these steps of the writing process. See the image above for an example of an organizer you could use to create your own biographies at home, too!

6) I have been conducting the winter round of Fountas & Pinnell reading assessments the last few days of school. These are lengthy and in-depth assessments that give valuable information about the children's growth in the areas of fluency, comprehension, and their overall reading level. This information will help me continue to select reading material that best suits their abilities during guided reading time. I have a handful left of assessments to complete this week.

7) We are nearing the end of our unit on Rocks. This week the children's explorations focused on minerals. The children looked closely at a collection of both rocks and minerals and worked to separate them. They selected a mineral to observe closely, and then conducted a streak test to see what this mineral would look like in powder form.  We also took a Scavenger Hunt around the building to see which minerals we could find in our school. We learned that there are minerals everywhere!

Here are some photos as the children hunted for minerals throughout the building:

 The children noticed that Mr. Gries was wearing a digital watch that contained the mineral quartz!

 Mr. Deptula in the music room had a set of windchimes (not photographed) that appeared to be made from copper or brass. He also had a cool lead glass window!

 We scoured the LMC for minerals. We noticed that the mineral lead is found in computer equipment, and checked it off our list!

 We walked past the parking lot and noticed that lead is also found in car batteries and gas tanks. Check, Check!

 We stopped in the teacher's lounge and found a stainless steel sink, cutlery, and cooking utensils which were made of nickel. We also found chalk which comes from the mineral calcite, and table salt that comes from halite! We headed through the office toward Mrs. Sessler's office! She let us take a look around and helped us find a few more minerals.

 We noticed a sculpture on the window ledge that could have come from iron, a planter that could have come from feldspar, and a pretty gold ring!

 Mrs. Kelley in the office was eager to assist us on our scavenger hunt and brainstormed ideas with the students, too!

 After walking past the painted walls (muscovite) and the mirrors in the bathrooms (quartz, silver) the children wrote down their final notes with their pencils (graphite) and came to the conclusion that minerals are everywhere! They are a part of our lives every single day.

It was Olivia's week to shine at school! We were so happy to welcome Mrs. Quinn to our classroom for Olivia's star student festivities on Friday afternoon. Olivia did a thought-provoking experiment that reminded the children of how friction works as they learned back during our science unit on motion! Olivia showed the children how wheels (straws in this experiment) reduce the amount of friction between objects and allow faster motion. Olivia then read the children a story about the "Big Bad Wolf" and of course we shared as a class why we think our Olivia is a star! What a sweet, hardworking, caring, and friendly student she is! We are so lucky that she is in our class this year!