Safari Friends

On Friday, we got together with our friends in the elephant class for some Safari Time. We did some more comparing and contrasting, but this time, we were comparing second grade elephants and giraffes instead of wild ones!

Each of the giraffes picked the name of one of our 2B friends out of a box, and we worked together to find at least three things we had in common and at least three things that were different about us. 

It was great to get to know some new peers and reconnect with classmates from the past. We can't wait to travel to all of the second grade classrooms next week as we celebrate Johnny Appleseed! 

Amazing Animal Facts!

To go along with our current unit on nonfiction in Reader's Workshop, we were asked to research amazing animal facts with our parents using various resources as part of our homework. We recently submitted our facts to Scholastic for their Amazing Animal Facts Contest! Several facts will be chosen to be featured on their Amazing Animal Facts poster. Here are a few of the facts we submitted:

• Male ostriches can roar like lions
• Houseflies always hum in the key of F
• A Hammerhead Shark's babies are called pups
• Great White Sharks have about 300 teeth
• Tigers have stripes on their fur and on their skin. They are the biggest species in the cat family with very large tongues and they can jump over 15 feet
• Elephants can smell water up to 3 miles away
• A beaver's teeth never stop growing, so they have to continuously gnaw on objects to keep them at a good length
• The Pygmy Marmoset is the smallest type of monkey
• A giraffe's tongue is black/blue in color and is 18-22 inches long
• A panda can eat as much as 22 pounds of bamboo per day 
• Butterflies taste flowers with their feet before drinking its nectar to make sure the flower isn't poisonous 
• The Harpy Eagle is one of the largest species of eagle and its wingspan can reach up to 6 1/2 feet
• The Great Grey Owl is the world's largest owl
• Koalas have similar fingerprints to humans

We hope to hear back from Scholastic soon, but we had a blast learning so many interesting facts from all around the animal kingdom!