An important part of our science curriculum in elementary is “Problem Solving through Technology,” which is emphasized particularly in the Buoyancy and Boats unit in grade two. With the help of parents who sent in materials, students built their own boats in a boat-building competition to see whose boat could float and carry the heaviest load. We worked on designing, prototyping, and testing different versions of our boats, and the students were thoughtful in considering buoyant materials, stability, and how their watercraft would be propelled. Check out our pictures below to see their impressive creations!
0 Comments
In Math, we are beginning a new focus on geometry. In this unit, we will be learning about 3D objects such as cubes, spheres, cylinders, cones, and pyramids, as well as 2D shapes such as triangles, squares, circles, and rectangles. The learning goals for this unit are to:
You can help your child achieve these goals with the following activities at home:
You can also play the video and games below for extra practice at home! We've been working on boats in our classroom since Spring Break, and the students have highly enjoyed exploring how different materials float or sink in the water and have done some excellent problem-solving in our boat challenges. There is also quite a lot of excitement among some students who have been reading about the Titanic and discussing why it sunk! Because of our in-school field trip this upcoming week, we will be wrapping this unit up by the end of the month. In our unit on buoyancy and boats, students will work to achieve the following outcomes:
The variety of cultures in communities across Canada has been a recent focus in our class, and this week we celebrated Easter Ukrainian style by decorating eggs (or “pysanky”). The students used kitskas and beeswax to create designs on their eggs, and we used real Ukrainian dyes. It was very exciting to see how they turned out after we’d melted all the wax off!
We made good use of our two-digit addition and subtraction skills this week as the students set up their own classroom stores and went shopping with pretend Millgrove Gift Certificates. There was lots of adding sums, subtracting to figure out change, and thinking about how we use math in our everyday lives. We also performed some price comparisons between items from a toy store flyer to see the difference in price using subtraction.
Some wonderful drama students from Concordia University performed "The Child Who Cried Wolf" for the grade one and two classes today! There were plenty of laughs and scares, and it was really neat to see actors performing a play they had created all on their own. The students favourite parts were the wolf coming out to terrify the villagers and watching the very silly sheep. The actor who played the main character actually went to Millgrove when she was in elementary school, so it was wonderful for the students to see how far their education can take them!
2B officially voted in the 2019 Alberta Student Vote! Over the past month, they've enjoyed evaluating different policies and are very excited about participating in the democratic process. We learned about respecting people's opinions, and what types of ideas were matters of fact and which ones were matters of opinion. Our class vote was quite a tight race, and it was exciting for the students to watch and see how the student vote and adult vote the next day turned out. They promised me I could expect unanimous voter participation from them when they're 18! This past week we learned about the artist William Wegman. William Wegman is a photographer who is famous for taking pictures and videos of his Weimeraner dogs wearing costumes. His dogs are very well-trained, and have even appeared on Sesame Street. This month, 2B made our own silly-looking drawings of dogs in human roles. We hope you enjoy them! We enjoyed our big in school field trip where we explored buoyancy and boats this week! We conducted many experiments, learned a great deal about what causes objects to sink or float, and the students even got to construct their own boats! It was a great afternoon of learning. Special thanks to our instructor Shari and our four wonderful volunteers!
Our fantastic school librarian Mrs. Smith helped us become published authors this week as week as we took some good copies of our writing and published them in Millgrove's library! Each piece has its own unique barcode and the students are all officially catalogued in the library now as authors. It was delightful to see the students taking out each other's writing, and for them to know that their peers around the school can take their writing home and read it!
This week we got to practice our badminton skills in PE! It is tricky to learn to control the birdie with the racket, but the students worked hard and got some great rallies in by the end of the week. You can watch the world's longest badminton rally below, which was 108 shots! 2B has been lucky to receive dozens of postcards from classrooms around Canada this year, and it was our turn to send out our postcards this week! We wrote to the other Canadian students about our favourite Spruce Grove facts, including Jennifer Heil, Jack's Grill, and some of our favourite events at Millgrove like the pet parade. We can't wait to receive the rest of the postcards from Canadian classrooms over the next few months!
Our school is lucky to be participating again in the eight week Rainbow Connection program sponsored by Save On Foods and TransAlta Bri Leisure Centre. The Rainbow Connection was created to increase the amount of vegetables and fruit consumed daily by children. The program encourages students to try diverse fruits and vegetables while learning about healthy eating for life. The program also includes a daily exercise guide to promote the benefits of daily physical activity. Participants will learn nutrition awareness and why physical activity is important for overall wellness. If you would like to receive weekly emails with a recipe that includes the fruit or vegetable they tried, as well as a family activity, and wellness tips, please register by clicking here. During the program students will be encouraged to eat more vegetables and fruit through education, taste testing, and tracking. We are now having weekly samples of vegetables or fruit delivered to our classroom (this week we got to try out oranges!). You may have heard of March Madness, but 2B took part in a book tournament called March Book Madness over the past month. There was a bracket of 16 entertaining and interesting picture books, and we have enjoyed reading the selections. We voted at each of the rounds of book face-offs and the big winner this week was the Canadian book "Finding Winnie!" Our class' favourite was "Not Quite Narwhal" by Jessie Sima, which you can listen to below. It's always a treat to be exposed to new literature, and we loved seeing what readers around the world liked reading the most! |
Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade three teacher at Millgrove School. She loves science and reading, and lives in a little brick house with Mr. Barker and her kids Jack and Ellie. Archive
February 2024
Categories
All
|