Surprise Visitors and More Measuring Madness!

On Thursday, we were beginning to get our room ready for the wax museum when we were visited by The Dot Fairy and Father Folktale! Both knew lots and lots about fairy tales and folk tales, and they told us a bit about the characters we were about to become and how their stories began!

After Father Folktale left to find The Dot Fairy, we got to measuring our wax museum portraits before hanging them up around the room. We measured their torsos, waists, necks, wrists, ankles, legs, arms, and heights! We did all of our measuring in inches using measuring tapes.

We recorded our measurements and began to think about how our measurements were different from the measurements we've already begun to do on ourselves. Next week, we will do a bit more measuring and compare all of our results!

Measuring Medley!

At school and in our homework packets, we've begun to do a lot of practice with measuring. Ms. Riley shared with us the tale of the King's Foot and why we need to use standard units of measurement in order to measure things accurately! We also talked about how in the U.S we measure in inches, feet, yards, and miles. 

We worked in partners to practice measuring things in feet using rulers. We measured all sorts of items from around our classroom! 

Next week, we are going to put all of our measuring skills to use with a super special project! We can't wait to get started :)

What Time Is It?

This week in Math, we've been doing a lot of review with concepts we were learning about before vacation. We continued to explore measuring, place value, expanded notation, base-ten blocks, discussing a.m. and p.m., and telling time. One of our favorite activities from this week involved writing a time on a Paper Analog Watches and having our friends read the time!

The giraffes have gotten SO good at telling time and showing the time on an analog clock--who needs digital clocks anyway?? :) 

In addition to the other time games we've  discovered, Ms. Riley also found this awesome Giraffe Dash Telling Time game--check it out! 

We're Batty for Bats!

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 comparing Mega Bats and Micro 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! 

Unifix World Record?!

Over the last few weeks, we've been talking a lot about measurements and world-record lengths, especially since we've been learning so much about our very tall friends the sunflowers! At the end of math the other day, we tried to make a record-breaking unifix cube chain that swerved and curved around our classroom. There is not currently a world record for the longest unifix cube chain, but I am guessing over 30 ft. comes pretty close!