Social Studies Government

Ah the government. A hard concept for 2nd graders with the 3 branches, their duties, local government, the Constitution, and Bill of Rights. So much to learn!!! One way we tackled some of the issues is by becoming interviewers for our town's own mayor, Bill Minnis. The students thought of some really good questions for our mayor, then we walked uptown with our pencils and notepads and were little reporters in Morning Sun City Hall. When we were done, the students practiced their letter writing and wrote a thank-you back to the mayor and stated 2 facts that they did not know that they learned from their interview. We then worked on a 2nd grade Bill of Rights. The students brainstormed their rights as 2nd graders. This was typed up with some fancy font then, I age it with some watered down antiquing dye, it looks quite official. The students then get to pick a turkey feather and practice their own John Hancock with ink and then write their official signature on our own classroom Bill of Rights.

 

  

Learning with Food

For the past few weeks we have been able to incorporate food into our learning.  It always makes it fun to explore and then eat! First, we have been working on geometry and started our shapes by building cubes with marshmallows and pretzels.  They worked on how many edges and vertices they would need in their cube. Then, for St. Patricks Day we graphed with Lucky Charms. Finally, to start our new unit on matter in science we looked at liquids, solids, and gasses.  I was lucky enough to have some extra dry ice that was not needed for branding during the weekend and put it to use to add to our homemade root beer. It is such a hit to see the solid, dry ice bubble and make gas in the liquid. Finally,  we added our very cold root beer with ice cream  to make a root beer float.

Reading

We finished Charlotte's Web!!! This fit perfectly with the reading "Coast to Coast" day. We made our own spider webs with glue and glitter and adding an adjective to describe ourselves. We were able to get some AR tests done, read to the 6th graders, and read to the Preschool students, all the while in our pajamas. We finished up the day by finally getting to watch the movie Charlotte's Web.  I loved when the students said, "what about this part in the book" and we discussed that the movies do not always have all of the rich details of a book and how great it is when we make our own movies in our mind when reading.

This week we looked at Dr. Seuss and made our alliteration, simile, and onomatopoeia hats with an alliteration for our name on the tongue ( I can't remember where I found this idea, sorry to the clever teacher who thought of it.) I love seeing these in the hall and it makes a great decoration for our conferences. Be sure to check all of the pictures out on the 2nd Grade web site (Jan. - March pictures) of the students with their projects and our fun reading and pajama day .

We are now working on fairy tales and have been loving to read all of the different versions of the tales!

Polar Bear Learning

Hopefully the last of our big snows, very cold -25 days, and no school are over! In the meantime we have used the Arctic and Polar Bears for some learning. The students had to measure in math to try and make a 12 inch paw with 5-2 inch claws for our Polar Bear. Then, they each wrote facts about the bear on the paw to display. They also measured the bear and decided it was probably a male because it was 8 feet 4 inches tall and the females are from 6 to 8 feet maximum. We are now working on slow earth changes with fossils and dinosaurs.

National Symbols

The students have been working hard on their group project National Symbols. Each group picked a symbol to research, make a poster, and then a power point presentation to teach the rest of the class about their symbol.  All of the students did a great job and had practice working in a group to get a project done. I used our i-pad to tape the presentations for the students to watch. Many wanted to redo it because of something they did not like. They all did a fantastic job and are now experts on power point presentations. (A quick note -some of the video titles are not capitalized properly-note to self it automatically does this so when I was hitting shift it was changing to a lower case letter. Please excuse the error,) They will try their hand and making their own power points later. We finished off our week with our Valentines activities and party!

 

Playing In Snow, Learning about Snow, Snow, Snow, Snow!!!

For the past several weeks we have done a lot with snow. We have made pictures with a list of clues of something hidden in the snow. The students then drew their animal or object and used an clear, acetate overlay to hide it under snow. The students loved looking at  these and then deciding if they guessed right before peeking underneath. After listening to Snowflake Bentley on Bookflix and learning about how snow is made, the students made snowflakes on-line with the program Make-a-flake (they love doing this), cutting their own snowflakes from paper, and making a crystal snowflake. We do these activities as part of the 100th day to try and get 100 flakes made. We also wrote about playing with our friends and their favorite activities. Codder even brought in snow he had made from a kit. It has been a month of snow! 

Also this month, after learning about Martin Luther King, Jr., the students read and listened to biographies, and then wrote about a person in history. They practiced their typing skills and adding pictures to a document, then presented their biography to the students. I will add another post to talk about our measuring and math!

Goals for the New Year

The students practiced making goals for the new year.  They thought of a personal goal and how they can meet that goal and then drew a picture to represent the goal. Next, they had to think of positive things that they could do to improve the world around them. They had to write how they could make their home, classroom, school, community, and world a better place. After all of the writing was done they were able to make their head out of construction paper to add to their poster and then the final blowing of the horns for "Happy New Year!"