2nd Grade Structures

We were invited to Mrs. Zoll's classroom today so that the 2nd graders could "go public" with their structure projects and teach us about their structures.

Great job, 2nd graders!  Next year we'll get to create structures with Mrs. Zoll!

Creating Life-Sized Animals

After our research, we started coalescing our research and creating life-sized animals for our "Go Public" stage.  We'll be displaying these animals at the Exploration Celebration as well as in our school hallways so others can learn about them.
After we found out how big our animals were, we start by sketching out the shape of our animals on a paper that was the correct size.  We had to think and draw big!

Next, we paint.

Then we add details.

Then we cut them out...

...and mount them on backgrounds.  The gluing is the most challenging.  ;)

Adding details, labels, and fun facts to our backgrounds is the next step.

You'll have to wait until the Exploration Celebration to see the results!

Animal Research Groups

Because of our snow days, we were now really short on time to do our research and go public by creating life-sized animals!
We got down to the business of organizing our research groups right away.
First, we created our charts to keep track of our research.

Hazel, Levi & Ainsley will be researching octopus and jellyfish. 

Nora, Abe & JuliEva will be researching elephants.

Liam, Jacob & Trey will be researching sharks.

Gabe & Kobe will be researching cheetahs.

Brennan & Ephraim will be researching giant squid.

London & Peyten will be researching pandas.

Next, we created labels for our research baskets.

Stephanie, Maddie, Adelyn & Robert will be researching tigers.

We started researching right away.

We're on our way!

March Learning Mural

We were surprised at how much we learned in March, even though we only had 15 days of learning!

We got right to work, collaborating on projects.

Here is our finished March Learning Mural!

Tens Wedding

We figured out all the numbers that go together to make ten...to make them easier to memorize, we had a little Tens Wedding for our couples:

10 & 0

9 & 1

8 & 2

7 & 3

6 & 4

5 & 5

Here is a fun song about making ten:

Student Report

This month first grade was in charge of the student board report.
Liam, Brennan, and Ainsley stepped up to share our cool animal facts with the charter school board.

They also shared and showed how long the sun jellyfish is...over 200 feet long!

Great job, Liam, Brennan, and Ainsley!

Penguins & Math

During math we took an imaginary trip to Antarctica.

Here is a video that we watched about Antarctica.

We made special measuring tapes to find out our height.

We did a few mini-inquiries about different types of penguins, comparing sizes of different penguins.

First, we learned about Rockhopper penguins.

We researched information about them. Then we used a measuring strip that we made equal to our heights, and compared it to the height of the Rockhopper penguin. 

We learned that the Rockhopper is 18 inches tall.

We loved this video about the Rockhopper penguin:

The next day we learned about the King penguin.  We found out that it is 3 feet tall, and figured out that 3 feet is the same as 36 inches.

That's a big penguin!

Here is the video we watched about the King penguin.


Next we will compare these heights to the Emperor penguin.

Which is your favorite penguin?