May 29- Morning Field Trip to the Aboriginal Learning Center. We will be leaving the school around 8:30 am and will return at lunch time. Students can bring a hat and a water bottle in their backpacks as some of our morning will be spent outside if the weather is nice.
June 2- Grade 2 Assembly!!- We will be presenting some of our learning in a school-wide assembly on Friday morning at 8:30 am. Parents are welcome to attend. We will also be presenting in the afternoon again for the volunteer appreciation at 1:30. If you volunteered this year for field trips etc. then you can choose to attend either as the content is the same for both.
June 12- Swimming starts!
This week will be busy busy busy preparing and practicing for our assembly. When we are not rehearsing we will continue to work on these concepts below:
Science
The past few weeks have been full of buoyancy experiments and discussions. Students have been learning how the shape of an object can affect its ability to float or sink. Our class has discussed the different purposes boats can have and the what the differences are between the variety of boats (and their names)- and there are many! We will also be taking an in depth look at the importance of using waterproof materials when building boats before we start designing and building our own. Student are fascinated with the Titanic ship and it's connection to Canada. Many students were previously aware of the tragic story of the Titanic but they were surprised to learn that it sank off the coast of Nova Scotia. We will continue to study everything from canoes and kayaks to military aircraft carriers as we get closer to building boats of our own. Also if you have any materials at home that you would like to donate to creating our boats it would be greatly appreciated! The school is continuing to also collect reusable items for our Makerspace/Project centre so if you have any items like toilet paper rolls, bubble wrap, tin foil, cardboard, ribbon, elastics, etc etc. they will be happily received at the school.
Reading
The class has explored many informative books about the Titanic and other boats, which is a great way for them to practice their non-fiction reading strategies. Students have been using photographs with their accompanying captions to examine artifacts and historical pictures. Many questions arise as the kids read the texts and they practice using the index, table of contents and headings to try to find the answers to each others wonderings. We will continue to learn more about these strategies and work to understand new vocabulary concepts through scientific inquiry and our work in Social Studies.
Math
We have been working with our 2 digit addition and subtraction through the book Alexander who was rich last sunday book.
He is the same Alexander from "Alexanders and the terrible, very bad, no good day. Students love him because he is so relatable. In this book, Alexander gets $1.00 from his grandparents and tries to save it to buy himself these walkie talkies that he really wants but he keeps spending (or losing) his money. With this book as a springboard, we have discussed loonies, quarters, dimes, nickels, and pennies (even though we don't use them anymore they are a good representative of ones for place value). The class is exploring different ways that they can combine coins to equal 100 cents and practicing their understanding of 10's to help them add and subtract efficiently. We will do a few more problems around adding and subtracting using money (and different amounts) this week before moving into measurement. It would be great practice for students to use coins at home to count and then express/explain using addition or subtraction sentences.
