Happy New Year, 2022

Hello 2nd Grade Families and Happy 2022! 

This year has been many things for all of us, with unimaginable challenges related both to our personal lives and school. Despite all that, I must say this has been such a joyful school year for me. Your children are such hard workers, incredibly thoughtful and loving and truly love to be at school. THEY are the easy part of school for me and make my days so enjoyable. Thank you for all that you do to support them and in turn, support and trust me. I truly appreciate you.

SO, WHAT HAVE WE BEEN UP TO?! Even though there is snow on the ground, I love the prospect of spring around the corner and I love to grow and nurture plants. Our gardener, Tara has come for a visit and taught us all about mushrooms and how to take care of them. She left us with some Lion's Mane mushrooms and some spouts, too! We will water and monitor these for a few weeks and hopefully be able to harvest and try them in recipes for ourselves.

In math, I have been using a station model where students travel through four stations every two days. We do the main lesson as a whole group, but then I split them up to target different skills. Here are some pictures of students building a number line. We are studying the important features of a number line, such as evenly spaced "tick marks", and numbers in order.

These two students are practicing their place value knowledge.

This group is sequencing numbers with Mrs. Simon who helps out in math three days of the week.

In science, we are studying states of matter. So far we have learned what matter is and the three main states. We've also discussed what happens to each state of matter when you either add heat, or cool it down. We do an experiment every week, which is the kids' (and my) favorite part. These pictures are of students working together to create OOBLECK. What a super fun mess. We were trying to decide if something could be more than one state of matter. If you don't know about oobleck, ask your student what happened.

Last week's experiment had to do with properties of matter. We discussed why different clothing items were made with certain materials. The property might be flexible, like a leotard because a gymnast would need to be able to move in their clothes. In these photos you will see the beautiful hats students made to protect their heads on a sunny desert island. They were stranded and only had these materials to work with. They needed a stiff brim to keep the sun out of their eyes, a soft piece to go on their heads for comfort, and they were challenged to create something to protect their necks from the sun too!

These few photos are from our in class library time. I set up different winter themed stations after reading the book "No Two Alike", which talks about how snowflakes, as well as many things in nature are never the same, including humans! :)

These friends are coloring a snowflake and making a winter sticker scene.

These three friends are making snowflakes; one is cutting one out and two are using a technique called crayon resist. If you write with white crayon and paint over it with water color, you get a really beautiful winter scene.

Winter sports days are coming up this week. Please send your student in with FULL winter gear on both Wednesday and Thursday so they will be comfortable and prepared to enjoy our adventures.

Let me know if you have any questions about that! Or anything!

Be well, Ali

 

Our December Happenings

 Happy New Year to all of you!

I truly hope it has been a relaxing vacation for you, filled with things that make your heart happy. I always enjoy space to breathe, away from school, but I am definitely ready to be back and to see our kids. I can't wait to hear about their time away.

What we have been up to in December, was wrapping up our unit on Holiday Traditions and Celebrations around the world. Students learned (since the last post) about Kwanzaa, Christmas in different countries (Australia being our favorite, it's SUMMER THERE.), Winter Solstice and New Years. We noticed that regardless of where you live or what you are celebrating there are some common themes: family and close friends, food, and gifts. We also wrote New Year's Resolutions. Many students wanted to be nicer to their siblings or learn a new skill, such as skateboarding. Mine is to write down something I am grateful for every day. 

Here are some beautiful examples of  Mother Earth crowns that we made in honor of Winter Solstice.

In math we have been focused on solving addition and subtraction problems within 100. We have used unifix cubes and base ten blocks to manipulate and build numbers. We have worked hard at using models by drawing in our math books and writing equations to show our thinking. Right before break we learned how to decompose numbers and regroup! We sure were busy.

I run math class as a station model with four stops; skill building, game, computer work, and a station with me which is the main objective of the lesson. Each day the kids go to two stations, the following day they will get to the two they didn't do from the previous day, and then the pattern starts over. I love it because it makes it easy to give each student what they need, and I work closely with each child at least twice a week in math. It helps me see where they are at and target what they need.

Here are some photos of kids at stations.

Unrelated to our curriculum, we did have a special guest come one day. One of the Antioch interns at our school arranged a visit from the Southern Vermont Natural History Museum. We were so lucky to get to learn about and see some beautiful owls!! All the kids know, owls are my FAVORITE animals. I find them so fascinating and otherworldly. I swear the Barn Owl looked straight into my soul! Anyways, they were beautiful and it was a nice little treat.

A blog post wouldn't be complete without a building photo. The challenge was to build something related to the holidays we learned about. I believe this was either a Santa trap or a gingerbread house! HA.

And lastly, as a gift to my students every year I give them a book that I *hope* they will love and I let them pick from a bag of knitted hats that my grandma makes. I have been doing this for 13 years, since I became a teacher. I hope you all got to see the sweet hats they chose and read the book over vacation. I love seeing the hats on heads as my students grow and are in different grades. It makes my heart happy.

HOW CUTE ARE THEY!?

Things to look forward to: solving story problems in math, using the skills we have worked on so far this year. States of Matter in science! One of my favorite things to teach, because there are lots of experiments. Writing observations, predictions, and conclusions in our science journals comes along with this unit of study. We also have 3 winter sports dates planned. Please let me know if you are interested in chaperoning.

Be Well! <3 Miss Ali