Today the children were very lucky to have a Mad Science presentation.  I was so impressed with the children’s knowledge of rocks, and the earth.  They had a lot of fun talking about and classifying rocks and minerals.  They had the opportunity to explore different characteristics and elements of rocks and minerals.  The children had a lot of fun, and learned quite a bit!  They even had some fun things to bring home to share, and experiment with!

This week in Wonders, we will be completing the Unit 4 assessment.  This is a fairly lengthy assessment, so we will not have a spelling list this week.  We will also be revisiting some skills throughout Unit 4 that could use another look.  We will continue to work on contractions, irregular verbs, and similes, as well as spending a little extra time on writing skills. We have been revisiting writing really great opening sentences.  I am anxious to see how the children do on unit 4 assessment.

Wow!  We had such amazing donations at the beginning of the year, that our donations of soft tissues and disinfecting wipes have lasted us until now!  We could really use a few donations of either tissues or wipes.  We still want to keep our surfaces clean, and our second grade noses dry.  Thank you all so much for all of your generous donations!

It was so great to watch the children in yoga today.  Clearly, it was a fun, and exciting day.  Then, in the afternoon, we asked the chidden to focus themselves, and participate in a yoga lesson.  In which, they had to utilize skills that required focus – such as collecting pom pons with their toes.  What a great way to end a fun St. Patrick’s Day!

Today, in case you haven’t heard, there are leprechauns on the loose, (and a few stray mice!).  We, as a class, were on a mission to capture the elusive leprechaun, and bring the gold back to our families!  However, as amazing as our traps were, and as luck would have it, those sneaky leprechauns defeated our traps, and escaped.  Apparently those leprechauns felt bad for all of the work we had done, and left us some treats for our efforts.

Our STEM challenge today, was to build a trap using a simple machine, to hopefully catch either a leprechaun or a mouse!  Unfortunately our traps came up short, but the children worked hard on their projects.

Today we talked about how a story can be a drama, and also a follktale, and what elements make up each.  We broke into two groups to read a play that also taught a pretty great lesson.

This week, with Mrs. Kane, we worked on mapping our smarts.  The children examined what kind of smarts they felt like they were.  It was fun to see the maps that the children created of their brains to demonstrate their social smarts, school smarts, and others…