{Sweet Second Grade}

Love is in the air! And ALL things conversation hearts!!

We celebrated Valentine's Day with lots of conversation hearts activities. The Twosies first explored with surface area of a heart outline. Then they had to sort their hearts by color and create a Data Table and Bar Graph of their information. Finally, they had to write the fraction of each color.

Next the Twosies conducted the Scientific Process to see how many conversation hearts they could stack before their tower fell! I believe the record was 13!

And because we love to experiment with food, we explored with conversation hearts in water, vinegar, and the MICROWAVE. Conversation Hearts sink, they dissolve in water and vinegar, and they melt in extreme heat.

We watched this video to learn about the history of conversation hearts:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eLRi76Q6Aak

We ended our celebration by passing out our valentines and enjoying chocolate fondue! Second grade sure is sweet!!

{Famous Georgians}

The Twosies completed and presented their group research on one of our Famous Georgians. Each group worked together to create a Google Slides presentation. 

You can view their presentations here:

Famous Georgians Presentations

{Measuring Fish}

It's time to let you in on a little bit of Twosies excitement...

We've been spending a lot of time in our Aquaponics Lab, get this...measuring fish!! Because one of our math units is measurement and fifth grade needed to ensure that their fish are being well taken care of, we decided that we would track the fish growth for them!

When we first handled the fish we named them by letter (Fish A, Fish B, Fish C, and Fish D) and remembered them by descriptions we wrote down. After we got to know the fish, we felt that was too impersonal. So, we named them!! 

Meet the fish:

 Here's Mrs. Hilley measuring them:

Take a look at our data so far:

{Greenhouse Planning Meeting}

The Twosies were able to spend some time with our business partners, Lowes, to design and plan for the building of our greenhouse! We decided on an 8x10 structure that we will build out of wood. We will then attach corrugated plastic to our frame and add a roof. We are so excited to work with Lowes and lean on them for their building expertise!

The Twosies used their notes from the meeting to write directions for building the greenhouse:

We also made a life size blueprint to help us figure out the exact location of our greenhouse. We will be researching to find an area that is large enough, receives a lot of sun (but not too much), and that is close to our classroom. We will be tracking sunlight and shadows with this blueprint!

{Oh, Alaska!}

Our back-from-winter break Arctic Unit focused on the state of Alaska. We flipped the classroom for this Unit, and had the Twosies become the teachers! They chose from a set of topics, conducted research, and created a paper or digital poster to present their information. 

The topics included:

Alaska's History

Alaska's People

Alaska's Climate

Alaska's Attractions

Alaska's Animals

The Iditarod

The Northern Lights

This is always one of my favorite units and a great way to study the Northern Hemisphere! There are so many great fictional books about Alaska as well. We were also able to learn about Alaska's Inuit Folktales through our literature choices.

You can see the Digital Posters here:
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1xzGyW3Il5YOnjVd_0rsZ50q2ZJOJ5BisZA5RzZ104Oc/edit?usp=sharing

Here are some pictures from their presentations: