Class 2OL

After sharing our Inventions, accompanying brochures and our Inquiry Projects with our families last week, we had to chance to view each other’s work. The students enjoyed hearing their classmates reflections on the iPods (especially the music they chose!) They also gave feedback about what they liked and what questions they had. Students used this information and the feedback they received from their families to set some goals for what they could do differently next time.

What hard workers!

Students of Class 2OL have come up with some amazing inventions! We are working on making brochures to accompany their inventions. We are studying brochures and commercials to see what kinds of words and images advertisers use to sell products. There are links to three commercials on this site that we are asking students to take a look at for inspiration! 

Our geometry investigation is coming to an end. The children have spent the past few weeks discovering the different attributes of 2-D and 3-D shapes. We have discussed many new vocabulary words such as right angle, vertex, edge, face, base and many different shapes.

To wrap up our unit, we’ve been creating stained glass windows with 2 lines of symmetry. See if you can find the lines of symmetry in our windows.

I’m sure the kids have told you, but if not, we have 24 chick eggs staying warm in an incubator in our class. So if all goes as planned, we’ll be watching them hatch around April 14th!!! We are learning so much about the life cycle of a chick and how to take care of them. It is very excited and the kids have so many questions.

Here are a few things the kids of 2OL are wondering.

How many eggs does a hen lay at once? – Anna

What do chicks eat? – Gabby

How can you tell the difference between a breakfast egg, and an egg with a chick growing inside? – Dana

Were chicks related to Dinosaurs? – Ryan

How long do chicks live? - Cooper

Do you know the answers to our questions?

We plan on finding these answers and more along the way. Stay tuned…

After reading several biographies of Albert Einstein and learning that his birthday is March 14th, students in Class 2OL decided that we should celebrate his birthday. To celebrate, they wanted to:

-Do algebra (Einstein was into algebra)

- Play time games

- Learn about compasses (Einstein’s interest in science began when his father gave him a compass)

- Ask and answer questions (We learned that asking questions was the most important thing to Einstein.)

-Dress up like absent-minded geniuses

- And, what’s a birthday celebration without cake? (Thanks to Victoria for the Einstein pumpkin cupcakes!)

It was a fun day, made better by the fact it was what the kids wanted to do to celebrate their learning!

For the last several weeks, students have been investigating  topic of there own choosing. First they had to come with a list of topics that they were interested in, then narrow down that list to a few topics that they could spend a month learning about. 

 After choosing a topic, students found books,

on-line resources,

and people to help them answer their questions.

The topics range from learning Spanish to figuring out how a remote control works, and everything in between.

The next step is for the kids to find a way to share what they’ve learned. And for them to think about what they’ve learned about learning!

We’ll keep you posted!

Our graphing presentations were a success. Yesterday our class went to Mr. McFarland’s first grade classroom and presented the graphs to the first graders. Each presentation explained the following:

• The question explored
• Who was surveyed and why
• Type of graph
• What the key represented
• What we found out

The first graders did a great job of asking the second graders questions and giving them compliments. Way to go!!

Here are some pictures from the process and presentations.

In this week’s homework, I referred to a bookmark that had ideas for how readers interact with books. We weren’t able to put that together because we didn’t have school on Monday. So, there wasn’t a bookmark included in the homework. Students can still write what they are wondering. We’ve done quite a bit of that in class as the post below shows! Sorry for the confusion!

If you came into our room during our read aloud time, you would think you had walked into a third, maybe a fourth grade classroom! The students of Class 2OL are having amazing conversations about our read aloud selection, The Chalk Box Kid by Clyde Bulla. As we read, we are paying attention to our questions. We call them our wonderings, because it’s what we are wondering about the book.

In this picture, you can see the excellent questions the kids generated after looking at the cover, reading the blurb on the back and looking at the table of contents.

After we read a chapter, students record and share their thinking in their Reading Notebooks.

We expect that the students will begin to adopt this strategy of asking questions during their independent reading. We are exploring this strategy in fiction and nonfiction texts.

The kids have been working SO hard on their class cookbook. They have decided on all of the elements that should be part of the cookbook. They have also taken a ton of time studying a variety of cookbooks. The kids took what they learned from other cookbooks and used that information to create a class cookbook. They even worked in groups to create symbols for each of the five food groups. We made these symbols into actual stamps. They now plan on coding each recipe with a food group stamp.

Here are the stamps they have created. Can you guess what food group each symbol stands for?