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