Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
21 February 2018 Dear Dr. Roberta Bondar Families, Our Trickster Theatre residency is fast approaching! From March 5th to 9th, Dr. Roberta Bondar School will be immersed in a variety of drama, art, and curriculum-based activities under the direction of Trickster Theatre. Student work will be showcased in an original theatre production at the end of the week. Our residency is based on the theme: Inquire, Innovate, Inspire and Imagine – Embracing the Spirit of Dr. Roberta Bondar. It is going to be a great week! In an effort to accommodate all of our families for the performance, the production will be split into two separate evening performances on Thursday, March 8th. The shows will be performed at 5:30 pm and 7:00 pm. We have tried our best to keep families in the same performance; however, there are some situations where families will need to attend both performances. If you do not have children in both performances, we would ask you to attend only your child’s performance. If you would like to see both performances or are unable to attend Thursday evening, we would be happy to have you join us on Friday. Students will have the opportunity to see the entire production on Friday morning and share in the learning of their peers. Our friends from Amica will also attend the Friday performance. The performances have been organized as follows: Thursday, March 8th, from 5:30 to 6:30 pm
Friday, March 9th, from 9:00 - 10:00 am
Kim Howden Assistant Principal, Dr. Roberta Bondar School [email protected]
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With all the Olympic excitement going on around us, we didn't want our polar bears to feel left out. This week students participated in an Arctic Animal Olympics! There were 3 categories: Speed, weight and food chain. Students had to answer questions about how the animals compared to each other and then award each one a medal in each category. Ask your child which animal won Gold in each competition!
During the past month in learning about polar bears, we have been hearing over and over that blubber is an excellent insulator. On Friday we got to see if blubber is as amazing as we keep hearing. We did a demonstration where one hand got put into snow and the other hand got put into a bag of blubber (actually shortening, blubber's a bit tricky to get in Calgary). Then we got to feel for ourselves if blubber was good at keeping animals warm. Students were surprised at the temperature difference between their bare hand and their hand that was insulated by the blubber. Now we know why polar bears can swim in the cold waters of the arctic!
We have continued learning about Measurement in Math. Each group was given a string that was the length of a Polar bear, a caribou, a seal and a ptarmigan. They had to measure each one using non-standard units (such as pennies
We were fortunate to have a Curling Residency visit our school. Many of our students have been watching Curling during the Olympics and they were eager to try it out for themselves. During our residency we learned how to sweep, how to throw a rock and how to count the score. We will be continuing to build our Curling skills in Gym for the next few weeks.
I am attending 2 sessions at Teacher's Convention about teaching Math from a company I love called Box Cars and One-Eyed Jacks. Stay tuned for new and exciting ways to practice our math skills. Here's a teaser:
In all that we have been learning about polar bears and the challenges they face with the melting ice flows in the arctic, students have often expressed sadness about the fact that polar bears are a threatened species. One thing we're trying to do to help is adopt a polar bear. You may have seen the letter in our Home Journals asking to earn $2 to put towards our polar bear adoption. The World Wildlife Fund has a number of different polar bear adoption packages, we're aiming for the $55 package. Please help us with this very special project!
We took advantage of all the fresh snow this week to do a demonstration about insulators. We had three jars full of warm water to represent an animal. Each "animal" was then put into a bag with a different type of animal insulator and submersed in a bucket of snow. We measured the temperature of the "animals" at the beginning, and then measured the temperature again after 5 minutes in the snow. We discussed what was needed to make it a fair test and predicted which insulator we thought would work best. We wrote up our results in an observation sheet. Our results determined that fur was the best insulator. We also noticed that polar bears have both fur and blubber, which would make them very much suited to life in the arctic.
CONFESSIONS OF A GRADE 2 TEACHER: The results should have been that feathers were the best insulator. But, I'm guessing the way we positioned the bags in the snow, the feathers must have shifted away from our "animal". Luckily Scientists learn from their mistakes! There were some busy writers in our classroom this week. The Aurora Borealis, or Northern Lights, are a memorable symbol of the Arctic. We spent our week creating different ways to describe the Aurora Borealis. We started with verbs that describe the Aurora Borealis: We continued on with juicy words: Then we learned about similes and created some to describe the Aurora Borealis: Then we used all of our verbs, juicy words and similes to think of questions we would want to ask the Aurora Borealis: The final step in our process was to use the questions to create a poem about the Aurora Borealis. To help inspire us, we listened to music and had images of the Aurora Borealis on the Smartboard. We will reveal our poems at our Sharing Assembly on February 27th!
A polar bear is so large, it takes us a few weeks for everyone to measure it! We continued with our measurement of the polar bear. We are using non-standard units of measure to figure out Nanook's length and height. We used a shoe, a hand and unified cubes to measure him. You might notice that Nanook is almost all white! Next week we will continue with measurement and find the length of other arctic animals and compare them to each other.
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AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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