Also, check our our awesome woodsy winter owls. Some of us got so into making them that we created several at a time!
We're glad to be back to blogging after a quick break for Thanksgiving. The second graders kicked off the start of December's Winter Wonderland theme by learning about Winter Wildlife this week. On Monday we worked in groups to create giant portraits of ourselves as bears! This week we also learned about how animals prepare for winter when Mr. Mike taught us a game in which we had to be squirrels foraging for acorns. We had to use our heads to find good hiding places for our food so that the other squirrels couldn't find and steal away our winter supplies!
Also, check our our awesome woodsy winter owls. Some of us got so into making them that we created several at a time!
0 Comments
The Three Sisters: Corn, Bean, & Squash This week we learned about the legend of the Three Sisters and made our own "Three Sisters Garden" on our bulletin board. According to the Native American legend, the Three Sisters are corn, bean, and squash and they need one another to help each other grow. As many of you already know from our last post, we made a Three Sisters Soup as well! During this week we also learned that you can use plants to dye fabric and to make paints! This knowledge got put to work when we experimented with dying our own fabric. Then on Friday Ms. Kim visited our class to show us how to make paint from strawberries, which we later used to paint the fabric we had dyed! This week we also made Native American inspired gardening tools with Mr. Mike and Ms. Lauren as well as seed collages using corn, beans, and pumpkin seeds! Don't forget to check out the gallery for more pictures of our work!
Wow! After making our "Three Sisters Soup" yesterday evening, we had several parents approach us wanting to know how we got their children eating vegetables! We figured posting the recipe here would be a good start, but the biggest secret is really just having your child get involved in the cooking process. Even if it's a job as simple as washing the veggies or being "in charge" of opening cans or adding spices, its amazing how much a child's help during the making of a meal can contribute to what (s)he will be willing to eat! Three Sisters Soup:
1 can corn 1 can kidney beans 1 can squash (pie filling) 1 can pumpkin (pie filling) 1 medium yellow onion 1 clove minced garlic 3 tablespoons olive oil Directions: Heat olive oil in a frying pan and add minced garlic and onions. Sautee until onions are clear. Combine all ingredients into a soup pot and mix. (When adding corn and beans be sure to include the liquid from the can into the soup, otherwise the soup will be too thick.) Heat the soup to desired temperature and enjoy! Serves 4 First off, the second grade would like to thank Jessica Davis and her mother (Richie's mom and grandma) for their HUGE help in our Great Guinea Pig Cage Hunt! Jessica managed to find two great cages for free and Fido & Daisy the Guinea Pigs are in love with their sweet new homes! Huge thanks to the Davis family from us! All money donated to the guinea pig cage fund will be going toward food and bedding for our furry friends, so a big thanks also goes out to all our friends who donated to the cause! This past week our class has learned about the hunting and gathering techniques used by Native Americans. We drew hunting maps using our own symbols to represent animals and natural landmarks. We also created gathering baskets, which were a big hit for everyone. Our biggest endeavor lately has been continuing a project from last week which resulted in turning our class tent into a wigwam! Check out the photo gallery for photos of all these great activities!
Click here to see more wigwams! November marks the beginning of Native American Month here in the second grade room. This week we focused on the Wampanoag tribe of Massachusetts. We learned that early Wampanoags lived in wigwams--which they called "wetus". We made our own wetus in class and wrote about the people in our own family tribes. Succotash! In the kitchen we made Succotash and Journey Cakes, which are both Wampanoag foods. Succotash is simply beef, corn, and kidney beans sauteed on the stove top, but we were surprised at just how much the kids loved it! Journey Cakes are another corn based food and reminded the kids of pancakes. Essentially, that's what they were: cornbread pancakes. They were also a big hit! For more Deep Sea, click me! Well, what better time than the week of Halloween to explore the creepy creatures of the deep sea? We got this week off to a bright start by making our own version of an Angler Fish, who are known for the little "light bulbs" that hang off their heads and lead prey straight to their gulping mouths... Oh no! We also made Lantern Fish and other bioluminescent undersea friends (pssst... ask us what "bioluminescent" means!). Click the pic to see our Halloween Gallery! Another very, very awesome and exciting thing we did this week (beside our Costume Party) was when we got a chance to check out the Deep Sea Exploration Tent that Ms. Kim and Ms. Nicky set up for us in the gym. It had glow in the dark fish that we painted waiting for us inside as well as bioluminescent jelly fish and creatures of all kinds! This past week we continued our exploration of marine creatures with Shark Week! We made some totally awesome shark fin hats using silver vinyl and pipe cleaners. Check out Rachel to the left modeling one of our examples... Instant Halloween costume, perhaps? We also created an (almost) life sized diagram of a Great White Shark. While a real Great White's measurements are between 15-20 ft, ours only came out to about 6 ft due to the size of the board--but even in "mini" form our shark turned out to be a pretty frightening fish! Other projects from this week included our own Shark Fact Books as well as shark portraits made from texture rubbings. To create the rough look of shark skin we used sandpaper, cut it out into the shape of a shark, placed it under some paper, and ran a crayon over the paper to create an instant rough-looking shark portrait! We also read lots of shark related books including Nick Ward's "Don't Eat The Teacher!" Don't forget to click on any picture here to visit our Shark Week Photo Gallery! While learning about Marine Mammals this week the kids got to see and touch the vertebrae from a real whale thanks to one of BASE's kindergarten families who loaned us the bone for the week. The children were so excited and were at first stumped as to what the object could be. Guesses included a tree stump, a fossil, a piece of driftwood, and other ideas. A horseshoe crab! Sea Life & Habitats Week got off to a great start with a visit from Ms. Kim who brought in a real, live horseshoe crab! The kids all got to ask questions and even touch and hold some of the creatures. A sea star and various kinds of sea sponges were also there to see. Don't forget to peek into our photo gallery for a ton of photos of this awesome experience! By now we're sure everyone has seen our completed Sea Life Mural, as it takes up the entire front wall of our classroom! Most of the activities during this week centered around the creation of various fish and sea life to include as part of this giant piece of work. Jellyfish, crabs, sea stars, and more can be found swimming in our fabric sea (which we tie-dyed ourselves!). All in all, we had a great week! In other news, Family Night on Tuesday 10.13 was a great success. The second grade class would like to send a huge thank you to all the families that were able to join us for food and fun! If you couldn't make it, much of the info you missed was in last month's newsletter and in recent blog posts, but--as always--feel free to email us if there was anything specific you feel you might have missed.
This week was so exciting and filled with projects. We've got to admit that we started off with a snag, however, when we tried to watch the "Shallow Seas" episode of Planet Earth and instead ended up watching "Great Plains"... Oops! At least we got caught up in something educational, right? On Tuesday we got right back on track with our Oceans In A Bottle Project. We filled plastic bottles with one half blue colored watered and one half vegetable oil, added some glitter, glued on our caps, and--tah dah!--an Ocean In A Bottle is born! Check out the photo gallery to see pictures of the whole project! Another great project from this week included turning CDs into shiny fish with Mr. Mike. It was a great way to see how we can turn something old--like a scratched up CD--into something new and awesome. Mr. Mike also helped us use egg cartons to create wacky sea creatures like jelly fish and crabs, too! In the kitchen Ms. Lauren and some of the kids made blue jello mixed with Swedish Fish candies for a delicious under the sea treat, while in the classroom Ms. Nicky got us started on a new mural for the bulletin board. In this mural we're using fabric to design all sorts of sea life from fish to sea horses to whales! So far it looks great and we hope to continue it as we learn more about the ocean in the next few weeks. |
TeachersMs. Nicky Contact Us!Archives
March 2011
|