photo: Second graders weighed the trash they collected for the annual yard clean-up. (Scroll down for more photos.)
Welcome back from vacation! I hope you had a restful and/or fun break! This week in school....
* In the Art/Math Center, the children made grandfather clocks. The faces included hours and minutes. Not all were grandfathers, though! I think I saw some kids, and even a baseball player!
*In the Writing Center, we started our Mother's Day projects. Shhh!
*In the Computer Center, we took a peek at some of the exhibits we might see it the Bronx Zoo on our trip. The internet is a great place to prepare for a visit to anywhere!
*Every day we begin our math lesson with our "Time Sheet". Throughout the day, we do a "time check" - we look at the classroom clock. We will tie up our unit on time with a game of TIME BINGO!
*The Wartville Wizard by Don Madden, was a funny story about how a town of people learned (the hard way) how to keep their community clean.
* Our annual Earth Day clean-up brought us outside with gloves and trash bags to pick up some of the trash that accumulates around the perimeter of the yard where the wind lodges it in the fence and the bushes. In only ten minutes, we were able to collect almost a pound of garbage. That's a lot of trash, considering most of it was made up of paper wrappers. The heaviest item was probably an empty can of Red Bull. How did we figure out how much the trash weighed without the tray we weighed it on? Ask our second graders! They actually solved that problem on their own! (see photos below)
*We have continued our Patricia Polacco author study, focusing on problem and solution. Most of Polacco's books have more than one problem, and they are often solved by the same solution! We're also hearing a fabulous chapter book called The Prince of the Pond. Through this book, we're picking up some interesting information about frogs, and about pond life in general. The vocabulary is rich, too! The main character comes alive in the form of a puppet we take turns animating during the reading.
Before vacation...
*The Circus Science event was a smashing success! We hope you enjoyed your visit and the performances of all our young acrobats.
*To wrap up our unit on money, the children used colorful Friendlys menus to pretend to order and add. Reading the menus made us hungry!
Thanks for reading!
Peace,
Nancy Aranda
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}
;){kind=link}