Hawaiian Day and more!

Playing "Guess My Number"

Happy Hawaiian Spirit Day! The kids were so excited about the day today and about Family Fun night tonight! It was hard to keep the focus on learning, but we did our best! This week was full of fun and learning: We got the chance to explore making tops and zoomers to discover new things about motion. We wrote a question and hypothesis for how different objects would float or sink in salt water compared to fresh water. And, in math, we talked about place value and learned about hundreds flats and learned how to identify the value of numbers in certain place values. Finally, we had our All School prize of PCS Bingo, which we did as a school yesterday in the afternoon. This week's highlights are in the pictures below!

Hawaiian Spirit Day!

Exploring tops

All-School BINGO!

Hang loose

More tops

Balancing Busy Days

It's in a stable position!!

We had another full week this week, and especially it was full of excitement for the Sneetches musical. I think the musical was particularly a positive experience for our students, as they could connect what they saw in the play with our "purple dot, yellow dot" experiment that we did as a class last week. Plus, our class got to sit in the third and fourth row of the auditorium, so we had excellent seats to enjoy all the action. Another highlight was seeing how well-behaved, respectful, responsible, and engaged the Parkview students were. Your kids really know the expectations, and they follow through! I was very proud to be their teacher :)

Students were also very excited to practice some more balance-related experiments, including learning about stable and unstable positions for two different shapes, depending on where the counterweights were placed. We discovered that when the counterweights were placed on the bottom of the shape, almost every time the shape was able to balance on the popsicle stick. This was an interesting observation.

Excited to get our shapes in stable positions!

Finally, this week, our class started another new challenge. As a class, we came up with four "Secretarial" positions that could be held by students in the "government" of our classroom. Students were encouraged to apply for these positions based on what they wanted to do, and based on how they felt they could fit the position. Our class will have Secretaries of Health, Learning, Homework, and Reading. Their main job is to assist their teacher and each other in these roles. We will have 7 secretaries for the month of April, and then they will switch to 7 new secretaries for the month of May, giving many students an opportunity to participate. They are excited!

More Science

We're here to see the Sneetches!!

Waiting in line

Practicing vocabulary in many different ways

Bean Babies

Counting Money

What a week we've had in second grade! This week was filled with lots of remembering our expectations in school and practicing them after our long spring break. Students were also introduced to their "Bean Babies" this week. Each student has two dried lima beans that have their name on them. They are in charge of taking care of their Bean Babies and following Jaguar Pride in the classroom and in the hallway to show that they can be responsible for their Bean Babies. Students were really excited about it. We even wrote letters to our Bean Babies, telling them how we will take care of them by being respectful, responsible and engaged. Students also wrote to their Bean Babies telling them what they want to do with them when they take their Bean Babies home this summer.

We also had lots of money fun in math this week. Students counted with coins and bills and learned about counting on from greatest to least in value of either coin or bill. They are still doing their packet homework for this week, but that will change soon. However, they learned how to check off that they are being responsible by bringing homework home and then turning it in back at school each day. They did great and were so proud and excited to check off their names every morning!

In science, we began our unit on balance and motion. Students were challenged to find the center of gravity on cardstock crayfish. Then they were given clothespins to serve as a counterbalance and challenged to find multiple ways to balance the crayfish.

More letters to our Bean Babies

Balancing Crayfish

Wild about Reading activity

There are lots of pictures to go along with this week. Enjoy!

Another "Seuss"ical Week in Second Grade!

Wow! What a week--filled with fun activities and excitement for the coming Spring Break. This week in writing, students conducted a science experiment. Just like real scientists do, we asked a question: Did we think that a Hot Wheels car would go further off a ramp on carpet or on tile? We made our hypotheses, then Maryn demonstrated the experiment and our scientific writing by conducting the first experiment on the rug. Then the students were placed in groups to do two trial runs on the tile out in the hallway. It was an enormous success, and we were able to write down the procedures of our trials as well. After Spring Break, we will finish out by writing conclusions.

Another exciting highlight from this week was our celebration of far surpassing our goal of reading 1,000 books in the month of February! After the final tally, this second grade group read over 1,400 books in one month! That was worth celebrating, and we sure celebrated in style on March 2nd, Dr. Seuss's birthday. Students were able to experience their first Drop Everything And Read Day, in addition to watching Dr. Seuss's The Lorax. We enjoyed it, and are all looking forward to a refreshing and restful Spring Break!!

After Trial #2

Trial #1

D.E.A.R.

Writing out a conversation, without any talking. They did SO well with this challenge!