Forces & Motion with Mr. Girardi

On Monday afternoon, we had a very special guest teacher: Mr. Girardi.  Yes, he is Ms. Girardi's dad and a science teacher at Frontier!  When we began to learn about conducting scientific experiments and writing lab reports, Mr. Girardi generously offered to share his expertise about Forces and Motion with us.  We were delighted to learn about Isaac Newton's Laws and to observe as Mr. Girardi demonstrated these laws in a very engaging and exciting way. Check out these great scenes from our afternoon: 

Happy Birthday to Tyler!

What a great way to start our week . . .with Tyler's birthday! We all enjoyed Tyler's Birthday Share: a fabulous non-fiction book about minerals and gemstones.  Thanks so much for sharing this interesting book with us, Tyler!

Twins? Not really!

One day last week, Aleks had a twin in second grade and it was not his brother, Jack!  Check out this cute photo of Aleks and his "twin," Chris.

Questions, Hypotheses & Procedures

Second graders have been hard at work in Writing Workshop for the past two weeks.  We are now immersed in our new unit on Informational Writing and the children have been very busy writing lab reports. This week, we moved beyond reporting on a ready-made experiment into reporting on student-designed experiments.  Ask you child about his or her

• Question
• Hypotheses
• Procedure

Writing a clear, exact Procedure for a lab report is a very challenging task for second graders.  We have focused on using important text features such as 

• A "You Will Need" section (aka Materials)
• A Step by Step list
• Labeled Diagrams

Check out these pictures of the children designing and conducting their original experiments:

Espanol. . . Spanish at SES

While our new Spanish teacher, Profe Clarita, is away in Nicaragua, we were lucky to continue our Spanish lessons with Ms. Girarid today.  Ms. Girardi led us in a fabulous lesson focused on learning new vocabulary for the parts of our bodies.  We played "Simon Says" in Spanish . . . ask your child to tell you the Spanish terms for head, eyes, ears, neck, arms, legs, knees and feet.  

We also reviewed the phrase, "Me gusta comer . . ."  which means "I like to eat. . ." and the terms for some favorite foods like chocolate cake, vanilla cake, strawberries, potatoes, and tomatoes.  
 

To learn more about Profe Clarita's trip, we watched a short Time for Kids video about daily life in Nicarauga. You can also enjoy this video:

Time for Kids: Nicaragua

You may also want to check out Profe Clarita's website for more information about our Spanish classes. 

Espanol at SES 

Scenes from Indoor Recess

The exceptionally chilly weather kept us inside for recess almost all week.  While the children DEFINITELY prefer outdoor recess, they made the best of the situation and found many ways to keep busy inside.  Check out these creative, happy kids:

Cole and Iris created some very cool ramps in the block area. 

Daniel and Kaisac drew a very detailed road map for their cars.

Samara, Julia and Kateri created their own art table.

Evan was busy making marble mazes.

Theo and Aleks played Trouble.

River and Tyler built some tall block structures.

Chris and Wyatt worked on some detailed drawings.

Cole and Allisa worked on a colorful road map for toy cars.

Dollars and Cents

As we continue our Math unit on Money, we've been working on writing monetary amounts using the appropriate dollars ($) and cents symbols.  We've also been learning about the importance of the decimal point in writing monetary amounts such as $1.45.  We've learned that when we see the decimal point, we say the word 'and' as in "One dollar and forty-five cents."  We've been practicing this during Math Meeting using coins and white boards:

We have also been playing a Coins and Cards game to practice counting coins accurately and to understand the concept of equivalent coin combinations. For example,  I can make 27 cents using 27 pennies, or 2 dimes and 1 nickel and 2 pennies, or 1 quarter and 2 pennies.  Here are Wyatt and Kasiac showing one way to make 69 cents. They used 2 quarters, 1 dime and 9 pennies: 

Back to school . . . finally!!

Wow!  It was great to finally be back at school today!  Despite our Two Hour Delay, we got right down to business in second grade this morning. During Math, we reviewed our understanding of U.S. coins and equivalent amounts.  Check out these links to sing along with the One Penny Song and to play the Coin Matching Game we enjoyed this morning.

One Penny Song

Coin Matching Game

During Indoor Recess, some of our second grade friends were busy in the Block Area.

During Reading Workshop, we explored the text features that help readers to understand Non-Fiction.  We are about to launch a new Writing Workshop unit titled, Lab Reports and Science Books, so an exploration of non-fiction books is a good way to give our brains a "warm-up" for this important work.

  Check out some very busy second graders searching for text features: 

And here's a picture of the chart we created after looking carefully at a wide variety of non-fiction books.