Another way that we wrapped up our information unit in reading and writing was to create a Chatterpix about one of the animals that students studied as they read. Students had to learn the information through their reading and then create a paragraph that included what their animal's habitat was, what food they eat, information about their body, and about their babies or life cycle. Their recordings could only be 30 seconds so they packed a lot of information in a short period of time! We hope you enjoy learning a few tidbits about each animal!

Today in our class we celebrated the end of our reading and writing information units by performing surgery on text features from Scholastic News magazines. Students "surgically removed" the text feature that they found in the text and then placed it on the correct text feature page. They then explained how that text feature helped them to understand the text better. The kids had a great time being surgeons for the day!

We had many family members for our First Friday Family Read this month!  Here are just a few pictures I was able to capture. 

​Thank you to Mrs. Johnson for coming in to be our first Mystery Reader this year! Our class was so excited and were an excellent audience. If you haven't had a chance to sign up to be a Mystery Reader yet, I will have the sign up out at conferences. 

Second graders were given an exciting opportunity to become "Surgeons for the Day". A team from Medtronic, a medical techonology company that designs and manufactures medical devices that are used in a variety of surgical procedures, came to help get students excited about careers in science and engineering. Our own parents from KES, Mrs. Racenet and Mrs. Giacconi were apart of this team. Students had the opportunity to be apart of 5 stations:
1.     Mechanical Stapling (stomachs, foam, SULUS)
2.     Hernia (tacking, mesh, lap trainer)
3.     Wound Closure (suture, skin stapling, glue)
4.     Ligation (clip appliers ,open/lap)
5.     A& I (ports, instruments) and Surgical Trainers (2 trainers with peg games) 

This was a fun and exciting experience that we were very thankful to have! 

We had a great time at the Festival of Arts! Second Grade was able to see a presentation from Bushy Hill, create salamder art work after learning about salamanders and participating in African dancing.  We are so thankful for this wonderful day and all the hard work that is put in by so many volunteers leading up to and on the day of this special event!

Second grade has been learning about soils. An important part to soil is worms! Second grade learned about the importance of worms and how they help in the process of creating soil that is rich for plantings. Students observed the worms and then helped to create composting bags filled with soil, droplets of water, and spinach. All of this was done on Fancy Dress Day :)!
Students have been observing the bags over time and have seen that the worms have eaten all the spinach and now there is rich, valuable soil that can be used to plant in gardens.  
Check out some of the pictures of the second graders observing and discussing what they are noticing about worms.