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!
We completed our first service learning project of the year in conjunction with our rock unit. We took a page from the Kindness Rocks Project, and painted rocks and wrote a kind word/message on them, and then put them on the playground and field in the hopes that someone having a hard day would find a pretty rock that could cheer them up. Check out the Kindness Rocks Project here:
With the rocks we found in the Naturescape, we sorted them by color, shape, size, hardness! Then we recorded our sortings into our rock books.
To begin our rock unit, we read the book Everybody Needs a Rock. It shares 10 rules for finding the perfect rock. After we read it, we went to the Naturescape to find our perfect rock!
To end our unit on the Constitution, we held our own Constitutional Convention on Constitution Day! We also dressed up like Founding Fathers and took a tour of the Capitol Building.
We were lucky to have Representative Moss and Senator Iwamoto help out with the tour! It was a great connection of how they’re our current representatives just like the Founding Fathers were some of the country’s first representatives.
Representative even took us on the floor of the House Chamber!
To start our Constitution unit, we had no rules for 2 minutes!
It was loud, chaotic, and wild, and 2 minutes was 2 minutes too long in my opinion!
When we chatted about it afterward, most of the kids thought it was too loud, some thought it was kind of scary, but some loved it! We learned that rules keep us safe and fair, and that we wouldn’t be able to learn anything if we had no rules in our class!
We then talked about rules in our city and country.
Welcome, 2nd grader!
I’m so excited you’re in my class!
