Given that we are quickly becoming experts on Canada here in 2B, and the fact that the royal family is visiting Canada this week, 2B set to work making a short video with important Canadian facts and places so that William, Kate, George, and Charlotte get the most out of their trip. We wish them the very best time in Canada this week!
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In Science this week, we explored different magnets’ north and south poles, and examined magnetic fields. The students enjoyed testing what materials allowed the magnetic force to pass through them, and used various devices to view the effects of invisible magnetic fields. Stay tuned for our upcoming magnetic device project early next month!
We’ve completed our three “visits” to Meteghan, Saskatoon, and Iqaluit, and both the flight there and exploration of these three Canadian communities were very memorable. The students now have stamped “passports,” and they are such experts now that they served as travel agents this week and planned trips to a Canadian destination of their choosing. The class used their knowledge of these locations’ geography, climate, and people to envision the ideal trip and items required. Now if only our field trip budget could make those plans a reality!
PE this month has been focused on learning expectations for the gym and building teamwork skills by playing cooperative games! They especially enjoyed getting across the lava-like gym floor as a team using gym equipment, and playing Giants, Wizards, and Elves. Next in our PE learning will be soccer skills!
We are wrapping up our focus on increasing patterns in math this week. Increasing patterns are a brand new concept in grade two, and can often prove to be tricky, but the students in 2B have worked hard to describe, reproduce, extend, and create increasing patterns over the past couple of weeks. You can practice increasing patterns by taking the link to the game below!
We’ve started coding in our class, which means that we’re telling a computer, app, phone, or website what we want it to do. This week we used an app called Lightbot and a some robots named Dash and Dot to practice our skills in communicating, solving complex problems, and thinking logically and critically. The class found designing repeating patterns using Dash and Dot especially fun! As this CBC article reports, Today, computing is involved in almost all aspects of our lives, from communications and education to social media, banking, information, security and shopping. Networked computers are capable of controlling our homes’ thermostats and lighting, our cars and our health records. I am also leading a coding club for grade four students at Millgrove which has been a blast, and younger grades will have the opportunity to join later this year. You can read more about the thinking behind students being exposed to coding here, and we will keep you updated on our further adventures in coding!
Because of the timing, we missed out on watching the summer Olympics as a class, but we’ve had a blast checking out a few Canadian athletes in the Paralympics this month! Mr. Barker’s brother plays on a wheelchair rugby team with the incredibly talented Zak Madell, so we’ve had a great time cheering for Team Canada and sending/receiving messages from Zak. 2B felt that the Canadians were doing so well in the Paralympics that “they were stealing all the medals,” and expressed commendable sympathy for the other teams. What a sweet class we have!
This past Tuesday, we celebrated Dot Day in 2B. Dot Day is based on the book "The Dot" by Peter Reynolds about a girl named Vashti who initially believes she can't draw, but later discovers that everyone can make a mark in the world. 6 million people celebrated Dot Day this year, and we marked the occasion in 2B by dressing up in dots, making dots with aspirations of how we wanted to "make our mark," and even watching a livestream of the author Peter Reynolds reading his book and speaking about how we can all make a mark in the world. You can see the students' ideas and the book "The Dot" below! The students are off to a great start in their writing this year! We began with a focus on ideas and how to come up with ideas and make them clear during writing time. Recently, we have been focusing on refining the conventions in our writing, especially with punctuation, precise use of capital letters, clear spaces, and “grade two” inventive spelling. They’ve really enjoyed editing each other’s work for conventions, and sharing their writing with the class during author’s chair. 2B also worked hard to craft poems that reflected some of their favourite things, which you can see below!
In our continuing work on repeating patterns, we enjoyed touring the school this week in search of repeating patterns around Millgrove. We found that repeating patterns are truly all over the place, and the students composed collages of some of their favourites. We also learned about the process of designing fabric, and used our knowledge of repeating patterns to design our very own fabrics and identifying their elements, rules, and cores. It’s neat to see that the concepts we learn about in Math time are visible all around us in real life!
We have been privileged to follow the incoming footage from Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield's recent trip to the Arctic with a group of fellow adventurers, and it has been a great starting point for our conversations as a class about Northern Canada. As we're starting of the year looking at the diversity of geography and climate in our vast Canadian landscape, it's been very neat to get an up close look at the experiences of Chris Hadfield and his fellow icebreaker passengers. You can take a peek at some of the stories below, and see more on Chris Hadfield's Twitter account and the Generator Arctic website.
We have been patterning up a storm here in 2B! Patterning is one of our first units in math, along with skip counting and word problems. This past week we worked hard on repeating patterns, and will soon learn about increasing patterns. The Learning Goals for this unit are to:
You can help your child achieve these goals by using some of the following activities at home
A big highlight this month in 2B has been the start of our unit on magnetism in Science. We've been exploring what materials are attracted to magnets and which are not, and observing the effects of magnets on a variety of items. In this unit, we will be learning:
Later in the unit, students will be asked to construct a toy or game that uses a magnet at home. Stay tuned for more details about that project, and for our further learning about magnets! 2B has already started our Daily 5 and CAFE adventure! This is the reading and writing program implemented in our classroom.
Daily 5 is the structure we will use to plan our morning. Children will be busy completing meaningful literacy tasks. The choices will be:
Right now, we are focusing on increasing our stamina to work independently during Read to Self. Within the next few weeks, the other choices will be introduced. While the students are completing their literacy tasks, I will be meeting with small groups and conferencing with individual students. Daily 5 is how we schedule the reading portion of our Language Arts time. CAFE is what we study during this time. CAFE is an acronym for the four major components of reading. They are:
The students will learn reading strategies within each category. These strategies will become tools for the children to use to help themselves become better readers and writers. You can ask your child what strategies we have been focusing on from week to week, and I will periodically send home information about strategies we are learning about in our weekly email newsletter. (Don't worry if you haven't yet received an email--we are finalizing the lists of email addresses that we already have permissions for.) You can see that the students are off to a great start with their reading stamina, and have set very ambitious goals about how long we will be able to stay focused on our reading as a class. I believe that 10 million hours was a recent suggestion, and if any class could achieve that goal, I am certain it would be 2B! We have begun a new unit in Social Studies in 2B about life in three communities in Canada. One purpose of this unit is to help your child appreciate the diversity and vastness of Canada’s land and peoples. The specific communities we will study are:
Students will learn about the weather, geography, language, history, daily life, and economy of these three Canadian communities. There will also be opportunities to make connections to Alberta and Spruce Grove. You are invited to be part of our unit in a variety of ways, for example:
The students already have a sense of the geographic and weather differences between the communities, and are becoming experts at the communities where Zenia (Saskatoon), Kenojouak (Iqaluit), and Jean-Louis (Meteghan) hail from. We’re looking forward to an exciting unit! Today we learned about the art of Henri Matisse, a painter who was very important in the style of fauve art where artists painted with wild colours. We watched the videos below about Matisse’s art, and used his style to make our own self-portraits. The students did a wonderful job of imitating Matisse’s style, and their choices of pastel colours were lovely! We now have a very colourful set of class portraits. |
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
April 2024
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