TWAS - This Week at School

In literacy this week, students watch videos about Residential Schools and discussed their learning, thoughts, and feelings about Residential Schools.

Students wrote about the following:

     - What have you learned about residential schools by watching these stories?

     - What emotions and feelings are arising from these stories?

Then students drew a picture that represented their writing about what they saw in the illustrations from the books.

During Inquiry this week, students explored hot and cold.  They drew pictures of the seasons, thinking about the weather and temperature of each season. The Grade 2's also got a special tour of the school's furnace room to learn how our school is heated, discussed how thermostats control the heat.  

In math this week , students continued working on estimation and working on making a guess that's close enough to the true sum, rounding numbers to the nearest 10th and solving word problems by rounding the numbers to find the sum.

TWAS - This Week at School

During literacy, this week students have been using their 5 senses to discover the signs of spring. Students learned about acrostic poems, making smaller words from a bigger word (Springtime), and many writing tasks.

Students were introduced to estimation this week. They learned how to make an "estimation", that's a guess close enough to the true sum. Students looked at various items in various bags, containers or jars and recorded their estimated the amount and the actual sum.  Students were surprised that some items seemed to look less but had the sum of 85 or 100.

Inquiry this week, students had two paper airplane challenges.  Students had to build two paper airplanes and tested them to see which one flew the farthest and why? They discussed what worked?, what did not work?, and how they could improve their paper airplanes. 

The Best Part of Me

After reading the story The Best Part of Me by Wendy Ewald. This story is a collection of poems that highlight children's favourite parts of themselves. We have been exploring the questions "What is the best part of me?" After brainstorming, we wrote about what our favourite parts of ourselves are, and why. Students explored their uniqueness, diversity, and individualism. 

To finish our Best Part of Me project we took stunning black and white photos that highlighted their writing. 

We have been Prototyping!

After finishing our empathy interviews, we began the prototype phase of our design thinking project. Students brought in materials to create boats, cars, and planes!

First we read Rosie Revere, Engineer and The Most Magnificent Thing to gain inspiration. 

We loved building, creating, and making!

This Week at School!

We have been learning how to isolate middle vowel sounds! We have been practicing this skill during literacy centres and love finding what vowels can be used to make words!

After learning all about the prairies and the characteristics of Calgary, we used natural clay to create landscapes. We molded, rolled, squished, and had so much fun with this medium! We finished our project by painting and glazeing our landscapes.

Mr. Allen taught us about the Sacred medicine Tobacco. We learned how it is used and why it is so important. We planted tobacco as an invitation to learn indigenous ways of knowing.

 

I can measure items according to their length.

In math we have been learning how to measure using non-standard units. We learned that measurement follows rules:

1. You need to measure end to end

2. Your non-standard measurement tools need to be the same

3. No spaces in between tools

4. You need to measure in a straight line

We are working on problem solving and measurement. Here was today's problem:

"Make 3 snakes out of play-dough. Your snakes need to measure 10 cubes in total."

Students practiced measuring end to end, experimenting with length of their snakes, and ensuring they used all 10 cubes. 

After we solved our snake problem, added our cubes up to make sure they equalled 10. Some of our equations were:

5+4+1=10

4+4+2=10

3+3+4=10

6+2+2=10

Welcome back Grade 2's!

 We are so thrilled to be back at school!

This week we have been learning about collecting data. We know we can do this when we can:

- Create a survey question

- Make choices for my question

- Survey my friends using tallies

We have also been learning about magnets. We learned that magnets attract and repel things. We also learned that magnets have a north and south pole. We made magnet roads to rest our magnets!