Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
Grade 2 has a special visitor! His name is Nanook , which is the Inuktituit word for polar bear. He is a life sized bear and is going to help us learn about polar bears. On Tuesday we measured ourselves compared to Nanook and discovered that he was taller than all the students in our class. The black silhouette in the pictures is how tall Ivy is compared to our polar bear!
Once we compared ourselves to Nanook, we started measuring him to see how big he is. We used non-standard units of measure such as unifix cubes, hands and shoes to calculate his height and length. We learned that it takes a lot of grade 2 students to measure something as large as a polar bear. Ask your child how they compare to a polar bear! Wondering why our polar bear is brown and white? All of the grade 2 classes are working together to collage white materials over Nanook to create his fur. Watch for future updates of a pure white bear!
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One of the objectives in our Hot and Cold Science unit is to describe ways in which temperature changes affect us in our daily lives. (A very relevant topic during this cold spell!) We've extended this objective and tied it into our Social Studies topics to include the ways temperature changes affect polar bears in the arctic.
Students were given 9 facts about Polar Bears and how the melting of sea ice is affecting their habitat. Students read the facts and were asked to record their response to the facts. Some of the facts included: Did you know that the Polar Bear is at risk because its habitat is melting beneath its paws? Did you know that at least 2/3 of the world’s Polar Bears live in Canada? Sea ice is also the habitat for their main food, ringed seals. Polar Bears hunt seals that are resting on the ice. Sea ice is also used for mating and raising their cubs. Can you believe that most Polar Bears spend their whole lives on the sea ice? Sadly, Polar Bears now have to spend more time on land because the ice is melting earlier in the spring. This means they find very few seals to eat. Without sea ice and seals, polar bears are left to search for other food sources. This can lead them into communities where they eat from garbage dumps and human food sources. Can you believe that the sea ice is breaking up about 3 weeks earlier in the spring than it used to? That means Polar Bears have 3 weeks less to hunt for seals. Shockingly, Polar Bears are on the “threatened” list, which means they are at risk and have been disappearing. Students had many different emotional responses to these facts. Now that we know Polar Bears are on the threatened list, our next step will be to decide what we can do to help! The best way to become a better reader is to READ! The Grade 2 classes have been doing Book Club for a couple of weeks. Students are put into groups and take turns reading aloud to each other. Each week students work on a different skill to practice while they're reading. Some of our recent goals are: Reading rate (that is read at an appropriate speed, not too fast, not too slow), reading with expression and reading the punctuation.
This week we added Reading Response to our Book Club. Once students have finished their book, students pick one sentence starter to guide their writing and write a few sentences to reflect upon their reading. Some of the sentence starters are: -I wonder... -I found it interesting when... -I'm stuck on... -It was interesting when... -The best part is... In December students were introduced to verbs. This week we extended our learning by learning about "rule breaking" verbs and learning how to write verbs in past tense. First we practiced as a class. We discovered there are a lot of rule breakers! Then we demonstrated our knowledge by rewriting sentences about Polar Bears and changing the verb from present tense to past tense. To help us figure it out we used these sentences:
Today the polar bear will growl at her cub. Yesterday, the polar bear growled at her cub. We found having the word "yesterday" in our sentence helped us with past tense. A good exercise to try at home is have your child identify verbs while they're reading and practice changing it to past tense. If your child would like to bring Valentine's, we will be exchanging Valentine's on Wednesday, February 14th. If you chose to send Valentine's to school, please be sure you have one for each student in our class. Here are the names of our classmates: Ava, Griffin, Tristan, Jason, Jacqueline, Jamal, Yahia, Aubteen, Konstantinos, Faizan, Max, Derek, Ivy, Tahlia, Alex, Baraa, Heidi, Jacob, Tara, Taylor, Sophia, Parker, Kylie Looking forward to this special day!
In our "Hot and Cold" Unit in Science, 3 of the objectives in the Program of Studies are as follows:
In order to make it a fair test, each group used the same materials: One red solo cup, one sheet of newspaper, one piece of bubble wrap, one sheet of tinfoil and 4 cotton balls. Each group designed their own cooler and each group used different techniques to keep their ice from melting. Once our coolers were finished, we put little cups of ice in them and left them for an hour. To measure how well the designs worked, when the time was up we poured out the water that had melted off the ice. The students determined the less water that poured out, the more successful their design was. The next step in our learning is the apply what we know about insulators to expand our learning of animal adaptations. Hint: Blubber is an excellent insulator!
This week we have been using "near doubles" or "doubles plus one" to deepen our understanding of basic addition facts. We learned about Monkey in the middle as a technique to help us solve addition sentences quickly. Monkey in the middle works when the numbers you're adding have one number in between them. For example, adding 4 and 6 or 5 and 7.
In Science, we are learning about special features and adaptations animals have to survive in their environment. We started by considering how we adapt to the changing weather in Calgary. Then we watched a video from Cornell University about Adaptations that Animals make to survive the winter. We made a list of all the different things animals do to survive the winter. Finally, we applied our learning to one of four arctic animals. Students drew a picture of either a narwal, a polar bear, a ptarmigan or a snowshoe hare and labelled the adaptations that animal has to survive in the extreme weather of the arctic.
The students in our class have been working very hard this week to finish their legends. On Monday we finished our writing process. The ending of our legends had to explain how our animal lives their life now that they have the special feature. For example, how does having fangs make the snake's life better? After the writing process came the editing process. Each student worked individually with Mrs. Bradley to go through their legend. They made sure it had a beginning, middle and end and explained clearly how the animal got it's special feature. We also edited for periods, capitals, spelling and clarity of sentences. We want our readers to be able to understand our writing! As the final step, we made stamps of our animals and used the printmaking techniques we learned on our field trip to stamp our animal in our legend books. The results are fantastic! We are really proud of how our books turned out. Here are a few of our finished products:
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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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