Mrs. Bradley's Grade 2
This week we continued to learn about insects. Students began a research project where they picked one thing they were interested to learn about. Some topics are: What is the life cycle of a praying mantis? What is the deadliest spider? What does a praying mantis eat? What are the predators of the walking stick insect? Where do praying mantis' live? (In case you're curious why there's so much interest in the praying mantis, Kung Fu Panda 2 and 3 was on TV the weekend before we started our research. One of the main characters is named Mantis, and you guessed it, he's a praying mantis. ) While doing our research we have been collecting great words to add to our "Web of Words". It's getting very full! Each time we do some research, students are responsible to fill out a honeycomb with one new fact they learned. When you make our learning visible like this, it's very motivating! Students have started to ask for honeycombs when they're reading books about insects.
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We've been using Geo-boards to help us identify the characteristics and attributes of 2D shapes. Today, students we given riddles and had to make the shape based on the clue given in the riddle. Students noticed that even though they were all building with the same characteristics, their shapes look different.
After building our rectangles, we collected what we knew about them. In Science we had a fascinating start to our Small Crawling and Flying Animals unit. The Grade 2 teachers set up stations for an Insect Inquiry. We spent 2 sessions exploring and learning about all sorts of different insects. Before we started our inquiry, we thought about what we already knew about insects and what we wonder about them. Students were given some questions as guidelines to help direct their thinking but were responsible for their own learning and proving their learnings by recording ideas in their visual journal. We discovered all sorts of interesting facts about different insects! In addition, Each student was responsible for finding one word they didn't know before to add to our "Web of Words". Ask your child to tell you what their word was. Mrs. Bradley's word was "Exoskeleton" (She already knew it, but thought it was an important word to add to the Web of Words;) Our Insect Inquiry had a variety of hands on exploration and research in books or on the iPads: ![]() This is one example of how students documented their learning. This students created a Mind Map using words and images. All of the Grade 2 classes have finished building their model communities. Everyone was very excited to share their projects! We all gathered in the Library and set up all the models on display. Then we took turns walking around and sharing our projects. Students were able to ask each other about their community, how they constructed things and why they made the choices they made.
This week we began our Math unit on 2D and 3D Shapes. We started our unit by going on a Shape Hunt in the Launch Pad and Library of our school. We found shapes everywhere and the more carefully we looked, the more shapes we saw! We collected our data in a tally graph. Some students found over 50 rectangles!
This week students were introduced to a type of story called a, "Stuck Story". In a stuck story, the main character or object physically or figuratively gets stuck. The storyline is all about the characters working to try and get the person or object "unstuck". The first stuck story we read was Grandma and the Pirates by Phoebe Gilman. In this story, the Grandma is captured by pirates and the story is about the ways that she tries to escape. We used a story map to organize our thinking about the story and identify the setting, characters and the main events. Over the next few weeks we'll be reading more Stuck Stories and learn about the format so we are able to write our own.
We started a new routine called Weekly Words. Each week, we will be focusing on 10 sight words. On Tuesday mornings, students get to pick a strategy they'd like to use to practice the words. One strategy is making the words out of Play Doh: Another strategy is called Scribble Spelling:
This week we used base ten blocks and stacking to help us find the difference when subtracting 2 digit numbers. First we used base ten blocks and moved them around to understand that when you subtract, the answer will be less. We also learned that when you need to regroup, it means one of the "tens" is split up and gets put with one of the "ones". Finally, we used stacking and learned 3 different rhymes to help us with subtraction. Finally, we practiced, practiced and practiced! We made flap books (which will be coming home next week), we did questions as a group on whiteboards, we worked on our own to practice and we used numbers lines to physically see the difference between numbers.
On Thursday we began the final project in our Boats and Buoyancy Science Unit. Each student was given a milk jug as their starting point. Then they had to plan their boat with the materials that were provided. Once the plan was complete and approved by Mrs. Bradley, they were allowed to start building. Each student has their own boat book which included the criteria that their boat needed to meet. ![]() By the end of our building period, some students had finished their boats and were testing them to make sure they met the criteria. If not, it was back to building! All the boats parked in our Harbour!
Actual items Mrs. Bradley found on the classroom floor this week: Small bales of hay, rocks in three different sizes, seashells, a small otter and a cardboard person. After a lot of hard work, we have finished our Model Communities. Students are very proud of their creations. The learning target for our project was for students to show their knowledge of one of the three Canadian communities we've been studying. They were asked to show the land, the people, the resources and "other" in their model community. Now that we've finished our building we will be putting them on display to share! |
AuthorMrs. Bradley's class is made up of 24 students from Dr. Roberta Bondar School. Archives
June 2018
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