Happy Birthday Johnny Appleseed!

On Tuesday, we celebrated Johnny Appleseed's 243rd Birthday with all of second grade! We traveled to each of the second grade classrooms to learn about Johnny Appleseed and his favorite fruit. 

First, we traveled to 2H where Mrs. Healey challenged us to use our STEM skills to build a tower using only apples and toothpicks. Some groups found that if they built the tower too high, it fell over. Others discovered they could break their toothpicks in half to create more building supplies! 

Next, we went to 2D and Ms. Donlon helped us review our doubles facts with some apple stamping. 

After snack, we traveled next door to 2B where Ms. Bucklin taught us about the life cycle of an apple. We made our own lifecycles in true Appleseed-fashion on some paper pots!

After lunch and recess, we returned to 2R and Ms. Riley shared some facts about Johnny Appleseed with us through stories and videos. We aced our Appleseed Trivia, and afterwards we drew a portrait of Johnny Appleseed to hang in the hallway

We learned Johnny Appleseed was kind to both animals and humans alike. He traveled hundreds of miles half way across the country from Massachusetts to Indiana planting pear and apple trees for pioneer families to use for food. He would sell his trees for a low price, and often he would just give his trees away. We also learned he had 10 siblings!!! and had many tall tales (exaggerated stories) told about him once he passed away.

While we've been traveling, Ms. Riley had been cooking up some applesauce, which we got to sample once we returned from P.E. 

We all thought it was delicious!

We had so much fun celebrating Johnny Appleseed and learning with all of the second grade teachers. Happy Birthday, Johnny Appleseed! 

*We hope you will continue the celebration at home with our class recipe book, which will be sent home on Friday!*

Travel Brochures

On Friday, we were sent home with information regarding our last writing project of the year, creating travel brochures for destinations around New England! We talked about the states that were in New England (New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Maine, Vermont, Connecticut, and Rhode Island) and we discussed some of the places we have visited in those states:

• Funspot
• Newport, RI
• Bar Harbor, ME
• Acadia National Park
• Legoland Discovery Center
• Boston Children’s Museum
• Boston Science Museum
• Children's Museum of New Hampshire
• Boothbay Harbor, ME
• Franconia Notch State Park
• Freedom Trail 
• Museum of Fine Arts Boston
• Santa’s Village
• Story Land
• Franklin Park Zoo
• Stone Zoo
• Southwick’s Zoo
• Gillette Stadium
• Fenway Park
• TD Garden
• Odiorne State Park
• Old Orchard Beach
• Craigville Beach
• Nauset Beach
• Water Country
• White Mountain Central Railroad
• Attitash Bear Peak
• Mystic Aquarium
• Old Sturbridge Village 
• Plimoth Plantation
• Six Flags New England
• Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art
• Lake Winnipesaukee
• Sugarloaf
• Gunstock Mountain
• Martha's Vineyard
• Nantucket
• Loon Mountain 
• Isle of Shoals
• Ben and Jerry's Factory
• Strawberry Banke
• Stratham Hill Park
• York's Wild Kingdom
• Lake Champlain
• Rye Beach
• Hampton Beach
• Camp Lincoln

Feel free to add to our list with any public place that one could visit in New England--this project was a huge hit with last year's second graders as well as their families, and it inspired many of us to take some great day trips over our summer vacation and throughout the year. Our research is due back by Wednesday, 6/1 along with at least one small picture that can fit on our brochure. If you need to look at the information sheet to see what information needs to be collected such as contact information, address, admission cost, favorite things to do there, etc, you can find it here!

Want to see some examples of the brochures we made last year? You can find those here! Below is the example brochure Ms. Riley made for Southwick's Zoo:

Happy Johnny Appleseed Day!

We had a BLAST celebrating Johnny Appleseed Day on Friday! We got to go to each of the second grade classrooms to learn about Johnny Appleseed and the fruit he loved most--apples! 

Because Johnny Appleseed was such a kind and generous person, we spent our morning making "Apples of Kindness" to add to our "Johnny Appletree" which is now up in our hallway.

Each of us wrote one kind thing we could do for others, which ranged from volunteering, helping someone who is hurt, being a good friend, and helping someone pick apples! 

Our first stop was in Mrs. Healey's class, where we got to do a taste test for some different varieties of apples (fun fact: there are over 7,500 different kinds of apples!!!) and we also got to come up with some "Apple-icious Adjectives" to go with them! We made an awesome poster that is now hanging in our classroom. 

Our next stop was in Mrs. Atherton's classroom, where we did some Apple Math! We measured our apple's circumference and diameter as well as the length of the peel and we also estimated how many seeds our apple would have. 

We returned to our classroom for snack, which was filled with the smell of apples and cinnamon thanks to our cooking crockpot apple sauce! Thank you to everyone for bringing in an apple to add to our pot and use for our various apple activities!

In Mr. Saltus's class, we got to dissect and explore apples through science! We took some great lab notes to bring back to Ms. Riley's class. 

Afterwards, we went to Ms. Donlon's class to read Ten Apples Up On Top! by Dr. Seuss and we got to do some counting and drawing with apples. 

Finally, we got to return to Ms. Riley, where we did some apple stamping. It was so cool to see the star/flower pattern in the center of the apple and use it to paint some awesome designs! (Remember, we can only see that design when we cut the apples horizontally)

After lunch ,we got to enjoy our yummy applesauce after listening to a few stories from our first Mystery Reader! Some of us did not like the applesauce, but many of us thought it was delicious! The only two ingredients? Apples and a little bit of cinnamon, cooked on high in our crock pot for 3 hours. Before we headed off to Maker Space, we watched a Brain Pop video on Johnny Appleseed's life. We learned that not all stories about Johnny Appleseed are true, and those stories are called Tall Tales.But we do know that he was a very kind person who learned how to grow apple trees as a boy and he set off to plant apple trees (and even some pear trees) in many states across the north east and mid west United States! 

Thank you to everyone who made our celebration of Johnny Appleseed's 241st birthday a huge success! And thank you to our awesome giraffe photographers, who snapped some great photos in the other classrooms while Ms. Riley got to hang out with the rest of second grade :)