2H Class Blog!: Nov. 22nd News

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Mrs. Healey’s Classroom News (11/22/15)

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What We’ve Been Up To: This time of year is always such a nice time to slow down and reflect on all that we have in our lives to be thankful for. These second graders quickly realized just how much they truly were thankful for!

Turkeys? No turkeys here...

*Community: SMS second graders continue to learn about their amazing community. We've discussed in detail the different types of communities they are a part of (from their global community, to their local town, and of course--our classroom!) and how to be a citizen of a community. After launching this unit several weeks ago, we've directed most of our attention onto our town community.

Each Owl added a cutout of their home to bring their home community into our classroom!

We're very lucky to be a part of such an involved community. Second graders were surprised by several town community members who visited SMS to talk about their role in the community! Chief Scippa from the Stratham Police Department came on Tuesday and talked about how he works to help keep the community safe.

Later in the week, Mr. & Mrs. Goodrich came in to talk about Stratham history. Mr. Goodrich has had five generations of his family live in Stratham. He talked about a lot of changes he's seen happen! He went to school in a one-room schoolhouse (Stratham had four one-room schoolhouses, 3 of which are stilling standing!) It was interesting learning about how different school was back then (no, the second graders learned, they did not have computers!).

Mr. Goodrich brought lots of interesting artifacts with him to share.

In between our wonderful guest speakers, the Owls worked hard on creating a page for our community book. Thank you for ALL your help in sending in pictures---the book is coming out fantastically! Each child was extremely connected to this project and had so much fun creating the illustration as well as writing a blurb telling about their favorite place in Stratham!

While our book is off to the "Pitcher Publishing Press", enjoying taking a sneak peak! We look forward to reading the published version next week!!

*Science: It goes without saying, science ROCKED this week!! Exploring the question, "What's inside a rock?", the owls quickly realized there was only one way to find out....

It was a lot of work, but a ton of fun. They put the hammer to it, and were in for quite a surprise! Each rock contained a unique geode!! These scientists quickly went to work carefully examining their treasures and drawing detailed drawings in the science notebooks.

We'll be ending our earth science unit this week. As a culminating activity, Derek Small, from Wildlife Encounters, will be coming to present to SMS second graders this Tuesday morning. Derek will be bringing some animal friends along to talk about the animals who use soil and rocks to burrow and create habitats. It's going to be an epic finale to our science unit!!
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Wishing all of the 2H families a very Happy Thanksgiving! Enjoy the extended break :)