2H Class Blog!: May 13th News

Wishing all you wonderful mothers a very special day! Thank you for sharing your fabulous children with me each and everyday. You've done a great job! I hope you enjoy the special presents they created for you!

Highlights from our week:

*Wellness Walk: What beautiful weather we had for our Wellness Walk this week! In honor of Physical Fitness and Sports Month, the Wellness Committee planned this wonderful event to help promote walking as a fitness activity. It was a great afternoon to get our bodies moving! We enjoyed walking with our buddies as well as several parents, grandparents, and siblings! Thanks to all who were able to join us :)

*Science: We had a TON of fun designing and building our hand pollinators this week! I'm (as always!) continually impressed by their ability to plan, build, test, and improve their designs. We definitely have many future engineers in our classroom! Ask you child about the pollinator they designed.

As we celebrated the end of our Plant Unit, it was time to do a final check on our seed experiments.

The results were certainly interesting and surprising to say the least!

*Dyson Foundation: Ideas Box! Our highlight of the week, without question, has been the arrival of our "Ideas Box". The James Dyson Foundation partners with educators throughout the world to help bring engineering into the classroom. "By the time today's students graduate from college, the U.S. will need 1.65 million engineers!" The "Ideas Box" challenges students to find inspiration in everyday objects and develop ideas.

To begin, they were challenged to match famous (but lesser known) design engineers with their inventions and the time period of when it was invented. This took a lot of great thinking and conversation (no, windshield wipers couldn't have just been invented in 2009!)

After this preliminary work, it was time to discover just what was in the Ideas Box. We were told it was one of James Dyson's inventions and we were sent a video clip showing the invention being used in an unusual way...

...which led to a great science talk filled with discovery!

Jame Dyson and his team improved the everyday fan by creating this blade-less air multiplier! He evaluated typical fans and didn't like how the blades made them dangerous and how they also collected a lot of dust. His new invention is very safe and easy to clean! With that information in mind, next week our design engineers will travel around the room evaluating current products and weighing the good and the bad for each.

*Math: The final unit in our second grade math curriculum has us exploring geometry and introducing fractions! These concepts are all very hands on which has been quite engaging. We had fun this week exploring 2D shapes and paying careful attention to their attributes.

For additional practice at home check out these sites:
Kangaroo Hop - Recognizing Shapes

Shape Jeopardy

IXL (T.3 Count Sides & Vertices; T.4 Compare Sides & Vertices)

*Teacher Appreciation Week: A huge THANK YOU for the amazing luncheon on Tuesday. The food was INCREDIBLE and it was so nice to enjoy it with friends we don't see as often as we like. Mrs. Nash and I had a great time, felt VERY appreciated, and LOVED reading all of the beautiful notes and pictures from the students! Thank YOU for all you do! It is truly a gift to be a part of the SMS community :)