On Thursday, March 9th, we will be holding our annual Faculty vs. 5th Grade Basketball Game! The game will start at 6:30 pm in the gym and it is sure to be a night full of flash mobs, foul shots, and fun! The teachers have been practicing (as you can see above) and we are hoping to put another win in the books, but we know these 5th graders will not give up without a fight :)
This is a great fundraiser for SMS, and it is a fun opportunity to cheer on your teachers, siblings, friends, and our 5th grade buddies. We hope to see you there!
This week, we had our first Science Talk. After a lot of brainstorming, we established our norms, which are:
We sit in our chairs in a circle in front of the whiteboard
We respect everyone's words, and while we don't need to raise our hand to share our thoughts or connect with someone else, one one voice can be speaking at a time
We can agree to disagree
We stay on topic
After we established our norms and played a counting game to help us practice only having one person talk at a time without raising hands (this would be an AWESOME game to play at dinner as a family!), we got to work with our first exploration. Our question we were exploring was
What do we think we know about magnets?
Many of us thought magnets could stick to other magnets, and some of us thought they could stick to anything that was metal. Some of us also thought magnets could work through objects if the object was thin enough (like paper.) After our discussion, we got to our exploration:
We noticed:
Some magnets had a N and S, which we think stands for North and South. North and South can stick together, but North and North can't and South and South can't
Magnets stuck to the whiteboard, our blue wall, our cookie jar lid, the wagon, scissors, and our metal buckets
Magnets would not stick to Ms. Riley's bracelet or earrings
Some magnets could work through our hands
the red and blue magnets would only stick together if you touched the red side to the blue side
you can make a compass point spin with a magnet
We will continue our exploration of magnets next week as we begin writing in our Science Notebooks!
On Friday afternoon, we did a special kind of Easter Egg Hunt with missing addends!
We split our class into 3 teams, while Ms. Riley hid eggs around our classroom. Each egg contained 1-9 base-ten blocks, and when Ms. Riley said "GO!" one person from each team set off to find the egg with the missing addend.
When we found the egg with the correct number of blocks, we shouted "I caught the bunny!" and earned our team 1 point.
After a few rounds, we were able to remember where certain number eggs were hiding, so it became a dash to get there first!
We had lots of fun on our hunt for the missing addends, and I wish luck to all of the giraffes who will be doing some egg hunts of their own this weekend!
Our annual Faculty vs. 5th Grade Basketball Game is tomorrow night at 6:30 pm in the gym. The teachers have been practicing and we are hoping to put another win in the books, but we know these 5th graders will not give up without a fight! This is a snapshot of Ms. Riley's performance in last year's game :)
This is a great fundraiser for SMS, and it is a fun opportunity to cheer on your teachers, siblings, friends, and our 5th grade reading buddies. We hope to see you there!
The giraffes had lots of fun learning about web browsers (not to be confused with Bowser from Super Mario!) and playing various typing games in Maker Space today. Mr. Gagnon has put these sites on a Symbaloo page to share with us so we can access them in the classroom and at home. Thanks, Mr. Gagnon, and happy typing!
To make our Blind Sort a bit more fun on Thursday, we each picked a partner from our word sort group and played a game called "Invisible Man".
To play, we each had a whiteboard where we drew a stick figure with a smiley face.
Then, we took out our sort words and laid them out word side down.
We took turns picking words from the piles and reading them and putting them into sentences. If our partners could spell the word correctly, they got to erase one part of their stick figure. If they did not spell it correctly, we got to erase part of ours!
The first person to make their stick figure "invisible" by erasing all of its part was the winner for that round.
We had a lot of fun playing this game with our sort group buddies! Please feel free to play this game at home when sorting your words for homework :)
On Friday, we focused on our tens facts. We learned that all of the tens facts make a rainbow on the number line:
0+10=10 10+0=10
1+9=10 9+1=10
2+8=10 8+2=10
3+7=10 7+3=10
4+6=10 6+4=10
5+5=10
we learned how to play a fun new math game called Fishing for Ten! It is very similar to the game Go Fish, but instead of fishing for pairs, you search for numbers whose sum is 10. We played this game with our top-it cards, and we used the cards with the numbers 0-10 on them.
For example, if someone had a 7, they would want to ask someone else for a 3. If they got a 3, they would put those two cards down as a sum.
This would be a great game to play at home! Just use a deck of regular playing cards without the kings or queens. The aces can count as 1 and the jacks can count as 0 :) Have fun!
Today we had our annual Bat Day in second grade! Each of the second grade classroom traveled around to each of the second grade teachers to learn all about bats.
Ms. Arnold taught us about Echolocation, which is the method bats use to see at night and find their prey. Bats make ultra high-pitched sounds and use their awesome ears to listen to their sound waves reflect off of objects. That is how they know to avoid large objects such as trees when they are flying and it is also how they find food like mosquitoes and moths. Dolphins also use echolocation to find their way around the ocean!
Ms. Arnold taught us a fun Echolocation game and showed us this fun song by Batney Ears! That was one of our favorite activities of the day :)
Mrs. Atherton explored the weight and wingspans of bats with us! Bats have very lightweight bones so they can fly, so even the largest bat in the world (the Giant Golden-Crowned Flying Fox) only weights about 2 lbs despite having a wingspan of up to 5-6 ft! The smallest bat in the world (Kitti's Hog-Nosed Bat or the Bumblebee Bat) only has a wingspan of 5 inches and weighs 1/14th of an ounce! Both the largest and smallest bats live in Asia.
Afterwards, we went to Mrs. Caporello's classroom to learn more about bats and complete a bat puzzle, and finally we traveled to Mrs. Leonard's classroom to play a game comparingMega BatsandMicro Bats. The majority of bats are micro bats and they eat insects and other animals, while mega bats are larger and eat fruit or drink nectar. Mega bats have larger eyes than micro bats, so their vision is slightly better than that of a micro bat.
A watercolor creation from one of our friends in 2AA!
Finally, we came back to 2R, where we learned more about the times of day when a bat is most active with Ms. Riley. Bats are nocturnal, so they usually come out at dusk, just after the sun goes down, and catch their food at night. They return to their roosts at dawn, just before the sun rises. Bats have very sensitive skin on their wings and also have sensitive eyes, so they do best in the nighttime when is harder for their predators to find them and they have plenty of prey to feast upon
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Ms. Riley showed us how to paint our bats during these different times of day by mixing watercolors to create our sky and using crayon resist to make our bats and scenery pop out! It was so cool to see everyone's different color combinations.
We had an awesome time working with all of the second grade teachers to explore these awesome mammals. We are Batty for Bats!
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