Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
We had a fantastic day at Granary Road learning about bees, arachnids and ants. The students represented Dr. Roberta Bondar School so well and impressed our guide with their knowledge of insects. We learned new things, we played, we added to what we already knew and we climbed. A recipe for a perfect day in Grade 2!
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They're still growing! When I left school on Thursday afternoon, most of our caterpillars were hanging upside down in a "J" shape. When we return on Monday, we should see a Chrysalis in each container.
We continued with our "Diary of a Butterfly" writing today. The entertainment value continues to be high as students focus on writing from the caterpillar's perspective and using "voice" in our writing. As you can guess by the Shape Hunt homework that was sent home this week, we are working on 3D Shapes. We started small by building shapes with plastic pieces. After that, we brought it up a notch and constructed 3D Shapes out of newspaper. First students had to plan their shape and figure out how many sides it would have so they knew how many newspaper dowels to make. Once they had that figured out, they started rolling the dowels. It was tricky and we had many frustrated students, but once everyone figured out the process, we were building up a storm! We had some excellent conversations about sides, faces, vertices and where we would see these shapes in real life. It was a fantastic building process!
We're STILL writing stuck stories! Students have been working very hard to extend their writing. Each time we work on our stuck stories, for focus on one part of the story to write. We are encouraging students to take their writing to the next level by adding detail, using "Show not tell" writing, as by modeling examples of excellent writing. We started our week focusing on story beginnings. ![]() From here, we continued on to describe the problem that takes place and move towards the attempts to get unstuck. We're almost there! Next week we will be finishing our first drafts.
This week we discovered that ants do a lot more to help humans than we realized. We looked at some pictures of ants and recorded what we knew about them.
We've read 4 "Stuck Stories" and compared how they are similar and different. Now that we can identify the parts of a Stuck Story, we are beginning to write our own. We started by planning the story using a graphic organizer. ![]() After filling in our plan, we looked in books to find examples of exciting story beginnings. Then we used our findings to write our own "Sensational Story Starters". Stay tuned for exciting stories as we continue the writing process!
On Tuesday students arrived to find a pile of 2D shapes on their desk. They got to explore and see what they could build. Then they were given a challenge! ![]() After creating their insect, students were challenged once more. This time, they were given a point system and had to figure out the amount of points their insect was worth. Students used a variety of strategies to find their answers. Most students used 2 digit addition, but some used breaking apart numbers and one student used a tally system. In the end, everyone got a value their were confident in.
Here are a few of our insects: Our caterpillars are growing! They're now large, black and have white hairs coming off of them. To document the new size of our caterpillars, we wrote another entry into "Diary of a Butterfly". Here are a few entertaining samples: Fingers crossed we have 10 little chrysalis when we arrive back from the long weekend. Then we will be writing from the perspective of the caterpillar inside the chrysalis!
Over the past few weeks as we've learned new things about insects, students have written one thing they learned one a honeycomb. We've been sticking them up on the wall to create our own beehive of knowledge. Our beehive is growing dramatically! Some of the facts recently posted include: -Spiders molt. -Spiders can travel by air. -Spiders are not insects, they're arachnids. -Spiders have a cephalothorax. -Cob webs, sheet webs, tube webs and funnel webs are types of spider webs. -Spiders lay eggs in a sac made out of spider silk. -Silk comes from a spinneret. -Spiders are actually helpful. This week we learned why spiders are important to humans and not very harmful. Did you know you have a better chance of getting hit by lightening than dying of a spider bite?
We have 10 Painted Lady Butterfly larva in our classroom. In other words, tiny little caterpillars. We will be watching them go through their life cycle over the next few weeks. This week, the caterpillars are the topic of our newest writing project, "Diary of a Butterfly". We have read Diary of a Worm, Diary of a Fly and Diary of a Spider and were inspired to write in the same amusing way that the author, Doreen Cronin does. We've determined that her books contain both fact and fiction with the fiction making the facts more entertaining. For example, the fact was that spiders eat butterflies, but the fiction part of it was when she said that butterflies taste better with BBQ sauce!
Our first entry into "Diary of a Butterfly" was from the caterpillars perspective. We had some very amusing entries describing "giant eyes staring at me", "earthquakes" and "Oh no! Someone is staring at me and I"m not even dressed yet!" Students are very motivated to observe our caterpillars and record their journey. |
AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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