Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
This week we did 2 experiments to learn about surface tension. One had us adding glass beads to a petri dish to watch the bulge of water grow. The other had us slowly and carefully dropping water onto a penny to see how many drops of water a penny could hold. Dripping water droplets onto a penny proved to be trickier than it looked. We had to be slow and careful or our water spilled right over the edge. However, our hard work paid off when large bulges of water formed on the pennies. We learned that the molecules on the surface of water create a thin layer, like plastic wrap, which is why we saw the big water bulge on our pennies.
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If you child has been singing about "Solids, Liquids and Gases" this week, it's from the Matter Chatter video we watched in Science. (Type Matter Chatter into youtube and you'll be able to watch it too!) We used a Crock Pot to melt ice and watch the ice change into water. Unfortunately, we weren't able to make steam in our short Science class, but we did learn that water can exist in all 3 states of matter. We put our brains together to think of examples of all of the states of matters. Of course, a group of 7 year olds figured out that farts are an example of a gas. Can't sneak anything past them! This week we also raced a variety of different liquids down a cookie sheet to test the viscosity. Our experiment had a number of surprises! We timed the length of time it took for each liquid to slide down the cookie sheet. Ask your child what happened to the shampoo! (Hint: It's the one that hasn't crossed the tape at the bottom.)
In honor of Remembrance Day, students were presented with a number of powerful images to practice their descriptive writing. Students were each given one of the pictures and used it to achieve our learning goal: I can write a descriptive paragraph about an image. I can paint pictures in the reader's mind by using strong words and descriptions.
We worked together to brainstorm strong words for the pictures and then the class went to work. During our writing process we had a mini-lesson on writing sentences with a variety of sentence starters. The results were outstanding! The finished paragraphs will be on display when you come in for conferences in December. This week we have been expanding our number sense and exploring what each number represents in a 2 digit number. We used place value charts and base ten blocks to create numbers and then documented our findings by recording how many tens and ones were in each. We had a class discussion about the following problem. Some students thought the 2s meant the same thing while others didn't. We drew the numbers as base ten blocks and confirmed that the 2 in 25 was worth 20, while the 2 in 42 was only worth 2. On Wednesday we had many "Ah-ha!" moments as we started to skip count by tens. We started with base ten blocks and continued to add tens until we saw the pattern increase. We practiced as a group and then went on to show our learning in our Math Journals.
A huge thank you to the 5 parents that came into our classroom to help with our Pumpkin investigations on Halloween. Our class divided into 5 different groups, each with their own unique pumpkin to learn about. We measured the height of our pumpkins, the circumference and the weight. We were shocked to discover one of our pumpkins weighed 30lbs! (Mrs. Bradley's scale wasn't set to metric). We also made predictions about how many seeds our pumpkins had and tested to see if our pumpkins could float. After our parent volunteers left, we were left with piles of pumpkin seeds that we needed to count. Fortunately, our Math learning target had been efficiently counting and making groups of 10. We applied what we knew and started counting. Our tables were covered in piles of pumpkin seeds! We took the data we collected and created a graph to display our findings. We quickly encountered a problem when we discovered we had significantly more seeds than numbers on our graph. Some quick thinking later and we relabelled our graph to count by 25s so we could fit all of our numbers. |
AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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