Blog Archives - mrsbarker.ca

March Book Madness

2/28/2016

You may have heard of March Madness, but 2B is taking part in a book tournament called March Book Madness over the next month. There is a bracket of 16 entertaining and interesting picture books, and we have enjoyed reading the selection. This year’s tournament slates realistic books against fantastical books, and the students are becoming skilled at categorizing their books as part of the reality or fantasy category. So far, "Wolfie the Bunny," “Chopsticks," and "Billy’s Booger" have been quite popular in our classroom. We’ll keep you posted on which books make it to the next round of March Book Madness!

Waterproofing Paper

2/28/2016

In this Science this week, the students had to help Mr. Barker with a problem. He sometimes takes his lunch in a brown paper bag, but when items in his lunch leak, his backpack gets soaked. The students set to work testing out different solutions to Mr. Barker’s problem. They found that wax crayons and rubber cement made the paper waterproof, but felt markers and pencils did a poor job. We recommended that Mr. Barker use the wax crayons because he likely doesn’t want his lunch tasting like rubber cement!

Paper Kicking Olympics

2/28/2016

In preparation for the Rio Olympics this summer, 2B held its own Paper Kicking Olympics in Math this week. We’ve been practicing two-digit addition recently in Math, so the students worked hard to measure and tabulate their totals, and their were some impressive kicks! Some of the students challenged themselves to add up the totals of large groups of students, which led to some very accurate three-digit addition!

Book Trailers

2/21/2016

Part of being a good reader is noticing what choices an author made in writing a text. In Grade 2, we learn how to explain why particular oral, print, or other media texts are our personal favourites. This past week in 2B, we chose a book that we enjoyed from the classroom and wrote a book review (or trailer). The students did an excellent job of finding the strong points in their books of choice, and presenting their thoughts in the book reviews below. 2B styled their book trailers in the format of Reading Rainbow's book reviews that we have watched. All the reviews are organized into the students' colour groups so that they can easily find their own video. We hope you enjoy our book trailers!

Valentine's Celebration in 2B

2/15/2016

We had a great day in 2B for our last day before Valentine’s Day. We got to be creative in Mrs. Smith’s Makerspaces in the library, and highly enjoyed our ice cream sundaes, exchanging cards and treats, and dancing to some fun music. There are plenty of great friendships to be celebrated in 2B!

Liquids

2/15/2016

In our continuing exploration of liquids in Science, we’ve been experimenting to see how absorbent different materials are. One of the scientists in our class generously donated a bunch of water beads so that each student could absorb the the beads before and after being placed in water. Suffice it to say that water beads are an extremely absorbent material!

We also tested materials to compare how much water they could hold, and learned that nylon fabric would make an excellent umbrella cover (because it was waterproof and absorbed 0 mL), and sponge would work very well to clean up spilled water (because it absorbed a whopping 49 mL). Stay tuned, because later on in this unit, we will conduct consumer testing to determine which paper towel brands absorb the most water.

Friendly Letters

2/15/2016

In this Valentine’s week, the students have been working hard on some friendly letters to give to someone of their choosing. We learned about where to put the date, commas, and salutations in our letters, and peer edited to make sure that the writing made sense and used conventions correctly. Jack even tried to write some Valentines this week. You can see the students’ writing below!

Number Lines & Subtraction

2/15/2016

This past week in Math we’ve been practicing subtraction, and we looked at a variety of strategies that we can use to solve a subtraction sentence. The students showed their mathematical thinking on number lines, and we played some fun subtraction games in class. We also looked at how we can solve subtraction problems by thinking of subtraction as taking away or as the difference between two numbers. Cutting apart 120 charts to create number lines was an interesting exploration, and the students were very impressed that the number lines were longer than their tables!

Winter Walk

2/4/2016

This past Wednesday was the 10th annual winter walk day in Alberta, and our class enjoyed participating with most other classes at Millgrove. 2B went on a scavenger hunt making use of the cardinal directions we have learned in Social Studies. It was a great day to enjoy some fresh air, get some exercise, and have fun with our classmates!