Music Making and Egg Drop #2 — The Early Learning Community First-Second Grade

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.