Friendship Celebration and 100th Day

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Last week students made many discoveries in our cedar classroom. Student scientists experimented with engineering and physics as they constructed catapults and launched pinecones into their air. They also gained hands-on experience with the states of matter as they discovered water in our pond had frozen into ice overnight! During our music time with Ms. McKenzie we learned a song about ice skating and practiced our music terminology as we created joyful music together. In art and writing last week we continued creating handmade cards for classmates and preschool buddies. We also designed valentine boxes to collect our sweet messages and gifts. We used our knowledge of measurement and fractions to halve and double cookie recipes as we baked chocolate chip cookies for our friendship celebration!

This Wednesday we enjoyed our friendship celebration where we shared cards and gifts with classmates. On Friday we celebrated our 100th day of school with a feast of 100 snack items and slideshow of our first 100 days of the school year. Students wrote about what their life might be like when they are 100 years old and also about what they would do with $100. Students also shared their collections of 100 items. We admired collections of money, rocks, barrettes, legos, sport cards, shells, pine needles, books, game pieces, and more. We marveled at the difference in sizes of our collections even though each contained 100 items! This morning we gathered as a whole school for Friday Summit and met in our buddy families to connect with students from classrooms across the school. We savored getting to read with our preschool buddies and got to spend the afternoon playing math board games. We also read a Flat Stanley update from Panama this week and sent another Flat Stanley to Hawaii!

Buddy Families and Coding Unit

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This week we finished our Rube Goldberg contraptions and teams had a chance to showcase their work to the class! It took much grit and persistence it to make a successful contraption. We’ve been reading a picture book called Rube Goldberg’s Simple, Normal, Humdrum School Day. This book is full of interesting contraptions and fun illustrations.  On Tuesday students started a coding unit. They will be learning more about basic coding and digital citizenship. During writer’s workshop this week students have been busy creating handmade valentines for their classmates. Students used watercolors and sharpies to create gorgeous cards and write kind messages. We will continue working on both coding and valentine cards next week. At Friday Summit this week we added a new routine called buddy families. Each buddy family has about twelve members and is made up of a couple students from each class in the school.   These multiage buddy families are a way for students make connections and build relationships with students and teachers across the school. Today we played a name game with our buddy families. Otters also had an opportunity to read to their Dolphin and Seal buddies this morning. Our students are really stepping up as leaders in our community! This afternoon we took a trip to the Pacific Library to stock up on reading materials. In other news this week, we enjoyed our first snowflakes of the season followed by hot cocoa and snow books, we found new fungus growing in our outdoor classroom, we celebrated a birthday, we finished our January calendar, and we enjoyed sunny afternoons spent with friends in the cedar classroom.

Rube Goldberg Contraptions

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This week our engineers worked in teams to design Rube Goldberg contraptions. A Rube Goldberg contraption is a chain reaction that accomplishes a simple task in a complicated way. Each team was challenged to design a contraption with at least three steps, that deposited a ball into a cup at the end. This challenge provided students with an opportunity to learn and practice several skills. First, students had to practice collaborating in an assigned team. They needed to take others’ ideas into account and assertively share their own ideas. Second, this task provided students with ample opportunities to practice grit and resilience. None of the contraptions worked correctly the first try! Instead, engineers had to make adjustments, try new ideas, and problem solve issues that arose. Lastly, this experience gave students a chance to explore foundational physics concepts such as force, motion, gravity. Many teams are close to completing the challenge and students will be sharing their contraptions with the group next week!

In math, both grades are beginning geometry lessons that will focus on shapes and then measurement. We read a book called Grandfather Tang’s Story and learned that tangrams are ancient Chinese puzzles that are still used today. Tangrams begin with a square that is partitioned into seven shapes, or tans. People can those shapes to create their own pictures and to tell stories. Students created several interesting tangram shapes. They also solved tangram challenges where they were given a picture, such as a storm cloud, and had to create that same picture using all seven tans without any overlapping. They had to manipulate and rotate the shapes to solve the puzzle. This too required persistence. Students used geoboards and rubber bands to create shapes and use geometry terminology.

On Friday mornings Steven’s dad, Mr. Greg, works with small groups of second graders on completing engineering activities. The first group finished building and testing their mini vacuum cleaners this week and got to share those with the group.

Over the last couple of weeks we’ve received several Flat Stanley updates. Several of these updates are quite lengthy and full of interesting information.  We’ve been slowly reading and discussing these updates while admiring photos from around our country and the world. We started learning a song called Fifty Nifty United States to help us remember the state names. We also continued our Charlotte’s Web read aloud. We are excited to see a performance of Charlotte’s Web at our local theater next month. Our first grade readers have been practicing reading their buddy books with good fluency and expression. Many second grade reading groups have been reading Scholastic magazines or new chapter books.

Felt Balls, Reading Buddies, and Library Cards

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This four-day week flew by in a flurry of excitement and new activities. Ms. Linda came in to teach us how to make felt dryer balls using roving. This activity required much persistence and stamina as students carefully added bits of roving to the ball, using firm pressure to create a spherical shape. We will continue our work on this project next week. Today was the much-anticipated first meeting with our preschool buddies too! All week long Otters practiced reading their books with good expression and fluency. Then they meet with buddies from both the Dolphins and Seals class to read their stories. Our Otter students read with good expression and respectful behavior; truly stepping up as role models for our community. We will continue to meet with our preschool buddies each Friday. This afternoon we visited the Pacific University library. The librarians there had been preparing for our visit by purchasing new children’s books, creating a cozy reading corner for young readers, and printing library cards. Students received their own university library cards that they can use each week to check out books. We felt so welcomed in this lovely university space and we can’t wait to for more library trips.

Music Making and Egg Drop #2

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This week Ms. McKenzie returned for some joyful music making! Each Wednesday she will visit our classroom to teach us about songs, rhythm, and musical terminology. This week we learned the names of different musical notes and learned a song called Little Johnny Brown. We used our music notebooks to begin learning how to read music. This week students visited our Otter popcorn stand and they are getting better at counting change to purchase their popcorn. During our unit study time students got hands-on experience with the engineering design process. They worked in teams to modify their initial designs to be more successful. We’ve been discussing how scientists and engineers must be incredibly persistent. Often times our designs don’t work the first time and scientists must modify and retest. Students who were successful with their egg drop contraption last week had to design a new contraption without using bubble wrap. This was tricky for many students! We spent a lot of time discussing what worked well in our designs, what didn’t work, and what we wanted to try next. This week Steven’s dad, Mr. Greg, visited the classroom to begin working on an engineering project with a small group of second graders. He will continue coming on Fridays to work with small groups of engineers in the coming weeks. In addition, Ms. Cassie began a mini-unit on coding. Each Friday afternoon students will spend time learning more about coding. Today students made some interesting observations in our outdoor classroom. We noticed some tracks in the sandbox that students believe were left by a raccoon. We also noticed fungus growing on the cedar tower.