On May 10, the 150th anniversary of the Golden Spike and the Transcontinental Railroad, we went to This is the Place Park to see their celebration!

Peter’s grandparents are real authors, so we invited them to come speak to us about the writing process! His grandparents are Richard and Linda Eyre, and they write many parenting books, and were even on Oprah!

We learned about editors, publishers, how it feels to get rejected, how long it takes to write, and how many drafts they write too! The kids had such thoughtful questions!

We have been studying Ancient China!

We learned about the Great Wall of China, and then made our own with facts we had learned!

The kids researched a civil rights leader, wrote a short biography, and then became that person in our wax museum!

We have had so much fun learning about Westward Expansion!

Each of the 2nd grade teachers took a portion of the unit, and we swapped classes to learn all the parts. Miss Haga taught about the Native Americans, Mrs. Edwards taught about the pioneers/Oregon Trail, and we learned about modes of transportation like the Pony Express and the Iron Horse.

Here are a few pictures of the kids acting out the Pony Express in relay race style!

We had such a blast at our Halloween party! Our parent helpers were awesome!

On Halloween, we did some pumpkin math and some pumpkin science!

For math, we made predictions about whether a pumpkin can float in water, then we carved and counted  the seeds! We tried to see what math strategies we could use to count the seeds so that we weren’t counting by ones.

Then Mr. Fuller dropped pumpkins off the roof because we’ve been learning about gravity! We learned that when 2 similar objects of varying masses are dropped, they will drop at the same rate!

We have loved our new science unit: the scientific method! We’ve been learning about states of matter, so we made a gas by mixing water and Alka-Selzters! If your child is asking for Alka-Seltzer’s, that’s why!