We had our second open store day on Tuesday. The second grade entrepreneurs had success selling their goods and services to the second grade customers in Mrs. Marinho's class. Some business owners continued their original business ideas while others changed to more profitable endeavors. We will have one more open store day on March 8th. On this day we'll invite our 7th grade buddies and parents to join us.
It was a Kids in the Kitchen week! On Thursday we cooked with sweet potatoes. We made sweet potato biscuits and sweet potato, apple, and celery salad. Both dishes were superb. A lot of the second graders loved both; many of them had seconds and even thirds! We hope that you'll make the recipes at home. Thanks so much to our parent helpers this week: Ana Romero, Vanessa Copans, Jonathan Lear, Elise Montgomery, and Manali Barua. We are looking for more cooking volunteers for the remainder of the school year. If you would like to help, please sign up here.
This week we began illustrating our published books. They will be on display in our classroom next week. Children will have a chance to read each others' stories.
We have finished our book clubs. To culminate our Clyde Robert Bulla study, the second graders will create dioramas of scenes from the books they read. On Thursday the students began by choosing a passage from the book he/she read. Then they drew a sketch of the scene and made a list of materials needed. Next week we will build these dioramas. We ask that everyone brings a shoebox to school on Monday. Children are also invited to bring supplies from home but we will use mostly things from school.
In math we worked on several concepts. On Monday we studied the food pyramid and talked about the different food groups. We then made a graph of our favorite foods and categorized them according to food group. We found out that the most popular food group in our class is grains. We made a tally chart and a bar graph of our findings. Partners also worked together to make a picture graph using bird data. Later in the week we worked on what are called "friendly numbers." We played a game in which we added three numbers together, called "The Three Addends Game." Children looked for friendly numbers to add together first. For example, 16 + 4 = 20 are friendly numbers. Numbers that are added together to make a sum of a number ending in zero are "friendly" because they're easy to work with.
Cookie took a visit to the vet this week for an annual check up and to have her nails trimmed. We found out she's a healthy rabbit! Would you like to take Cookie home over spring break? Let me know.
We will work on diphthong sounds ou (shout, pound) and ow (brown, growl). A diphthong is a unique vowel sound.