Getting Ready for Wonka Day

Wonka Day is just around the corner . . . we'll be celebrating Willy Wonka and all the characters of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory on Monday, March 3rd. Second graders will come to school dressed as one of the main characters from this fabulous story.  Remember . . . costumes should be created from ITEMS YOU ALREADY HAVE . . . please do not purchase any new items for these costumes.  Today we created Character Webs about some of the main characters in order to help each other think about appropriate costumes.  As a class, we all created a web about Mike Teavee and then we split into small groups to create webs about Willy Wonka, Charlie Bucket and Augustus Gloop. 

Our whole class created this Character Web which lists Mike Teavee's physical characteristics and his personality traits. 

Aleks is rereading a passage about Augustus Gloop to his partners, Evan and Tyler. 

Samara, Sarafina, River and Chris are creating a web about Charlie Bucket. 

Double Happy Birthday!

We got right back into the swing of things on Monday morning with a Double Happy Birthday!  Daniel had a birthday on February 23rd and Hunter had a birthday on February 24th.  We enjoyed singing the Happy Birthday song to our two friends! 

Happy Birthday, Daniel!

Happy Birthday, Hunter!

I CAN create a chart or table to organize my RESULTS.

As we continue to write lab reports during Writing Workshop, we've been learning to add text features to boost our understanding of our experiments and to help the readers of lab reports replicate our work.  We are currently focused on improving the RESULTS sections of our lab reports by organizing our data into a chart or table.  Check out our model table:

Our chart has the following text features: Heading, Labels, Columns, Rows, Units and Scientific Terms. 

Theo is working on his RESULTS section. 

Hunter is adding to his RESULTS section. 

Catapults!!

On Tuesday, we launched a new experiment during Writing Workshop . . . building catapults and asking the Question:  Using the catapult we built, which goes farther, the ping-pong ball or the cotton ball?

As you can imagine, this question, and the process of building catapults, generated plenty of excitement in our classroom.  Check out these photos of second grade scientists in action:

Cole is adding a text feature -- a diagram with labels-- to our lab report Question. 

Lab Partners Evan and Kaisac are discussing their Hypotheses using some important terms such as "speed" and "friction."

Lab Partners Hunter and Theo are also discussing their Hypotheses and making plans for their Procedure.

 

 

 

 

 

The class observes as Lab Partners Cole and Tyler and Lab Partners Samara and Wyatt create a plan for constructing a catapult using rulers, plastic spoons, rubber bands and masking tape.

Happy Birthday to Theo!

It was Theo's birthday on Friday, January 31st.  We celebrated by singing Happy Birthday to Theo at Morning Meeting.  Theo brought a very cool birthday share -- a crystal necklace.  We all enjoyed learning about the necklace and about the Pumpkin Festival where Theo got the necklace last fall.