The next day, we followed the same process of watching a video, but of a different type of natural wonder, the Grand Canyon. Students watched the video several times, drew models and added to them after each viewing, wrote three sentences using the
I asked the class why they thought I had shown them these two particular videos, what was similar about them? At first, they noticed that they both had rocks in them, both had something moving, and that they were both events, or places that were dangerous. Then we started thinking about what was happening when the lava was oozing across the landscape - the top layer of darker rock-like substance was hardening and creating new indentations on the surface of the ground. The new hardening rock was changing the landscape right before their eyes. This is an example of quick changes to the Earth's landscape. They then started to notice that the water flowing between the rocks of the canyon might have actually caused the canyon to form. They were fascinated by this concept, so we continued to watch the video with sound. The idea that where the canyon is now was once flat ground, and that over billions of years the landscape changed due to ocean waters rises and falling was fascinating to them! Our next step will be to brainstorm a list of fast and slow Earth changes and then from there each student will choose a topic from the list to study and write a, "Did You Know?" fact book.Monday, March 12th
Here is a little look at what we were up to on our recent field trip.
Friday, February 16th
In preparation for our trip to Marsh Billings Farm for animal tracking, we will take a look at some different animal tracks, examine some skulls of different forest animals to understand how location of eye sockets can indicate whether an animal is a predator or prey, and look at different teeth types to determine the diet.
Students will plan and conduct an experiment to prove that plants need sunlight and water to grow. We tried to do this with seeds in a CD case as part of a Mystery Science challenge, but as all good scientists do, we failed! It was a great learning experience and sparked a good conversation about how scientists don't give up, they try again, they adjust, they think about factors that could have contributed to the failure and keep at it. With this next experiment, we will use the base of celery stalks and place them in different environments and talk about the meaning of the word, "variable" in a science experiment.
Friday, January 12th
We have been learning about how forest animals prepare for the long cold winter. Students know which animals are hibernators, migrators, dormant and active during the winter. We played an, Animals in Winter bingo game where students had to listen for clues in the descriptions to make a guess about which animal was being described. We will learn how different forest animals move (straight walkers, hoppers, waddlers, and bounders), identify animals by investigating real skulls and looking at the position of the eye sockets and teeth types.
Then, we will move onto learning about different landforms, talk about how there are quick and slow changes to the land over time. We will be doing a lot of non-fiction reading, learning about the features of this text type, and also plan and conduct an investigation to prove that plants need sunlight and water to grow. We will certainly be busy!
Monday, December 11th
Here are some pictures of our building project progress. With me being out during the time when all other second grades were working a lot on the benches, it was hard to keep up with photographs and posting on the SeeSaw project blog. I thought I would share the photos I took while I was here.
Wednesday, December 6th
Our building project has come to an end. We have all three benches completed and in the classroom. Through the winter they will serve as alternative seating during meeting whole group lessons. We will need to do some paint touch-ups in the spring before we bring them outside. Thank you to everyone who donated tools, materials, and time. We really appreciate it!
We have been watching some Mystery Science videos recently. These videos are all aligned with NGSS (the new science standards that our school is working on aligning our science curriculum to). Each video has ample opportunity for discussion, pair sharing, whole group discussion, predicting, and reflecting. There is always a hands-on activity which students often enjoy. Here are the two we have done most recently:
1. How did a tree travel halfway around the world?
Second graders know that different plants and trees have different looking seeds, but this mystery really looks at the specific designs of seeds and how this is important to dispersal. We created 3 different models of different seed types and tested out which ones dispersed the farthest away from the shadow created by the canopy of the tree.
2. Do plants eat dirt?
This mystery shows students that plants don't in fact need dirt to grow. What they discover they need are the minerals that dirt provides plants in order to grow. This week we created a dirt free growing environment in the form of a CD case and a wet paper towel. Each student "planted" 5 seeds on the wet paper towel and sealed the case. We will observe what happens with the growth of the seeds over the course of five days. At one point, we will turn the case to see how the growth pattern changes.
We are continuing to select a Wonder of the Week from our wonder board as often as we can. Our last wonder was, "Why are volcanos so hot?" The class had many good thoughts about this wonder. We read a non-fiction book about volcanos but didn't quite discover the answer to our wonder. It was important to show students that you often will not find the answer to a question right away or easily. It often takes multiple resources, time and perseverance to learn what you don't yet know.
Friday, October 20th
For this week's Wonder of the Week, I posed the question, "If we enjoy enjoy learning outside, what can we do to allow this to happen more often?" The children quickly came to the conclusion that it isn't necessarily very comfortable to learn outside when you have to sit on the cold, damp ground. They had several ideas to solve this. "Lay out towels! Get some tree stumps! Bring out our chairs!" All of these are great ways to solve the problem of sitting on cold wet ground, but then when we thought about needing a surface to work or eat on, they had to rethink their ideas. Then I heard, "Mrs. Stone, you can buy more of the little purple lap desks!" As much as I'd like to provide one for each student, they aren't very sturdy and would hold up in wintery weather. When we finally arrived at the idea of seats with a table top attached, the kids began to think about all different designs. In the pictures to the left, students are designing their, "ideal" outdoor classroom space. They could dream as big as they wanted, as long as they could defend the existence of a section in their space. As long as their ideas can be connected to some type of learning, they were free to draw away! When asked to defend the existence of a trampoline, one student replied, "you know, so we can get exercise for our brains in a different way!" These designs will be posted out in the hallway at some point next week, along with some writing explaining each of the designs. Now that we have identified a problem and come up with a solution, we will start thinking about what we need and how we're going to get it. Stay tuned!Monday, October 9th
This week we started talking about what scientists do and what they use when they work. As you can see, the children came up with lots answers to these two questions. We will continue to add to this web of ideas as we discover more about scientists. Our W.O.W. was about learning outdoors. We went outside and silently observed with our eyes and ears, talked about how it feels to be outside, what it would be like to learn outside, and if we were able to be outside in a classroom-like space, what could we learn? This coming week, students will learn about a bird's eye view perspective and how to draw a model or map of what their ideal outdoor classroom space would look like. For everything they draw they need to justify their reason for having it in the space by connecting to what type of learning can be done there. I look forward to seeing the imaginations run wild. This is all leading up to our project based learning that was mentioned at Parent Information Night. Students will be lead to discover that there is a need for some outdoor seating so that we can do more learning outdoors. We will read some articles that provides reasons why learning outdoors is beneficial, we will determine what materials we would need, write persuasive letters to a local store convincing them to make donations for a project that supports student learning, and begin building, hopefully by the end of the month. You should be receiving an email with a Survey Monkey request for donations of supplies and time during this project. The email will be coming from Lindsay Moseley, parent of a second grader in Mrs. Wilson's class.
Sunday, October 1st
This week we explored the challenging concept of solar eclipses. To be exact, one student asked, "Why are solar eclipses so bright?" Following our preliminary discussion of what we think we know about this topic, we watched a Mystery Doug video that confirmed many of the information that the students thought they knew. The information that we had yet to prove, we searched for in non-fiction books and even the dictionary. We finally discovered that the outer-most layer, or surface, is actually the hottest; therefore, appears the brightest because it is the only part we can barely see during a total eclipse.
Thursday, September 14th
We have been doing all kinds of wondering so far this year! I've been emphasizing the importance of wondering and the impact it has on virtually everything in our world from advancement in technology to life changing inventions. Students have the opportunity to write anything they wonder on sticky notes and post them on the Wonder Wall. We will explore one wonder a week. This past week I chose the wonder to explore, and it just happened to be, "Why do bees have stingers?" Given that we have a bee theme in the classroom (more explanation on the reason for this theme to come :), it was the perfect one to start with. Each wonder gets a special poster like the one pictured on the right. We first brainstorm what we think we know about the topic, answers we think we know, and then we gather different sources (i.e. non-fiction books, videos, information from reputable/credible internet sites. To answer the wonder about why bees have stingers, we created this poster and then I gathered several books from the library and located a news clip from YouTube. We were able to answer this wonder from the video and gain other interesting information. Things that students learned included:
- Bees have stingers as a defense mechanism to protect their hives.
- Honey bees will sting yellow jackets and wasps if they feel threatened.
- When you get stung, you are usually less than 15 feet away from the nest or hive.
- Yellow jackets and wasps have a more similar diet to humans; therefore they tend to be attracted to humans more so than honey bees.
- Honey bees die after stinging only one time, whereas yellow jackets and wasps can sting multiple times.
The video really got the kids thinking and wondering more about bees. We generated more questions about bees and then I read a non-fiction book. We reviewed many important non-fiction text features including photographs, captions, glossary, etc.) Finally, they partner read to find answers to these additional questions. After reading, we shared out answers to most of the questions we had generated. The best part about this first wonder exercise was that students saw right away, that when you wonder, you often end up with more wonders rather than answers. We can't wait to see what this week brings!
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