Important dates:
Tuesday, January 10 - Field trip to Mercer Slough Friday, January 13 - MKL Jr. Assembly Monday, January 16 - MLK Jr. Day - No school Wednesday, February 1 - End of Semester - No school Wednesday, February 15 - Airplane Extravaganza - Evening time TBA Hi families, It is great to see everyone back this week! I hope everyone had restful breaks (hopefully without getting sick). I had fun in Milwaukee, hanging out with my partner's family and enjoying Lake Michigan. Airplane Project-Based Learning Wednesday we started our first PBL activity of the year. Airplanes! For our kick-off event, students created three different models of airplanes and tested them out, comparing how well the different models flew. We also reflected on our own experiences with airplanes, whether we have flown on them, seen them in the sky, or had fun constructing paper airplanes at home or in school. The rest of the unit will involve looking at the development of flight, how it has afftected our local, national and global communities, and issues associated with air travel. Project-based learning leads students through a process of asking questions, researching, writing and presenting on a real-world issue or topic. Students initially gain general knowledge of the topic through videos, books, newsarticles, speakers, and field trips. Then, after building this knowledge, students start asking their own questions and crafting their own solutions and ideas. Students create presentations to share their knowledge and solutions. Students often work in small groups to complete these projects. In second grade, learning the skills to work with a group is as imporatnt and the academic content. Students will start to learn to delegate, share, build and resolve conflict together. It's an exciting time and we're looking forward to it! Reading We started a second fiction unit: Studying Characters and Their Stories. In this unit we will dive into the lives of the characters and start noticing their motivations, emotions and changes throughout their stories. Writing In conjunction with the fiction reading unit, we have started our third writing unit: Writing Gripping Fiction. This is an exciting unit as students get to apply all of the skills they learned in the Small Moment Narrative unit to their own fictional characters. This is one of the few writing units in elementary school that students will get to take free reign over setting, characters and plot. We are looking forward to it! Math We are practicing different methods for adding 2-digit and 3-digit numbers both in equations and word form. Next week we will move on to subtraction strategies.
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Ms. ThibautOne of the second grade teachers at QAE. Read this blog and stay up-to-date on classroom activities. Archives
March 2017
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Ms. Thibault's 2nd Grade | Class Blog |