This week the kids had a variety of hands-on and authentic learning opportunities!
As a part of our science unit on life cycles, the children measured the size of the hands, head, and feet to track their growth throughout the year. We also chose a class tree in the courtyard to follow through the seasons! We felt the tree, smelled the tree, observed the tree, and measured the circumference around the trunk of the tree. Meg noticed today that a few of its leaves turned red- that were not there yesterday! What a terrific group of observers we have!
Here, Ryan measures the length of Frankie's foot. We are excited to see if our predictions about how much we will grow will be close!
Scott helps to measure Meg's foot drawing a point on each end and connecting the points to make a line segment! We measured using centimeters.
Here, Emma evaluates the drawing of her foot!
I thought it would be fun to show some "behind the scenes" shots from Picture Day! Here we are getting all lined up for our class photo.
Say "Cheese," Curtis!
Look at these handsome fellows!
Beautiful smiles for Picture Day!
A reading strategy we worked on this week was making connections, and to think about how we feel while reading the text. The kids chose a book to read with their partner, and then they talked to each other to process the text afterward! They wrote down their thinking/connecting in their reading notebooks.
I was so impressed with how engaged the children were with their reading. They worked together very nicely, and they were both very active participants in their reading!
Here we are sitting under our tree in the courtyard. We observed our tree using all of our senses: hearing, touching, smelling, and seeing. We wrote down what we gathered in our science notebooks!
The children touched the bark of the tree. We noticed that the bark was relatively smooth, especially when we compared it to another much taller - and older- tree that was near it in the courtyard!
Here we are on a motion hunt. While our life cycle unit will span over the course of the year, the unit we have just begun that we will focus on for the month of October is motion.
We walked through the school looking for any examples of motion we could find, and jotted them down in our science notebooks.
David was our star student this week! He read a hilarious book about Dragons who love to eat tacos. It was apparent that David practiced his book several times before reading it to us, because he read it very smoothly and with so much expression! It was a lot of fun to listen to!
David's mom came in to celebrate David's star student week with us! She shared some more interesting details about the cool pictures that David brought in this week.
David mesmerized us with his science experiment that tricked our eyes! We stared at the green, yellow, and black posters he created, and when we looked away, we saw something completely different! It was remarkable!
We are so lucky to have such a fun, playful, and happy student in our class! David is a great observer and he adds lots of interesting ideas to our class discussion. You had a great week David!
One last thing to note: the kids logged into their kidblog.org accounts today! We practiced writing our very first post about our learning this year. Not only is this a fun way for the children to document and discuss their learning, but it was good typing practice, too! The children were reminded to always be respectful, be accurate, and be appropriate when creating posts to share on our class blog. They were very excited to share their own thinking! The children do have permission to respond to each other's blogs as long as their posts stem from our learning at school and fall under the guidelines I mentioned above.
The link to our class kidblog is: https://kidblog.org/class/2nd-grade-2015-2016/posts
The children know their passwords.
Have a great weekend!
:) Kelly O'Sullivan
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