The Scientific Method

Spontaneous Problem: Name three syllable words.
Boundary Breaker: What does a scientist do?

We used the books My Teacher Likes to Say by Denise Brennen-Nelson and There's a Frog in my Throat by Loreen Leedy & Pat Street to introduce idioms.  Students had a good time pointing them out in conversations throughout the day.  We also used the lesson to help us solve some picture plexers from our brain stretcher packet.



Next students worked hard on their chapter 1 or 2 check-up from our place value and base 3 math practice.

We also spent time sharing our museum artifacts and looking at the Inventions and Inventors project that students will have the opportunity to work on over our upcoming break.

We finished by introducing part 2 of our exploration unit, Exploring through Problem Solving.  We began by looking at the scientific method as a problem solving tool.  Today we went through the steps and conducted a class test to see how many random numbers a second or third grader could hold in their brain without forgetting.  Check out our format here.  Five was the lucky number that discredited all of our confident hypotheses.

Archaeological Adventure!

We hit the road to Charleston to check out what history we could discover at Colonial Dorchester and Charlestowne Landing.

Colonial Dorchester gave us a peek into colonial life in South Carolina as far back as 1697!  Students were able to tour and participate in the excavation still happening on the site today.

 

 

Charlestowne Landing is the preserved site of the first English settlement in South Carolina, founded in 1670!  Students were able to tour the land and museum and see how archaeologists have used their discoveries to recreate structures present in the original town.

No Third Graders Allowed! :)

Spontaneous Problem: Name things you need to go explore.
Boundary Breaker: When was the last time you were an explorer?  What did you discover?

Today the second graders had the place to themselves.  We used our time to fill in some gaps, progress in math, and brush up on the elements of creativity.

We used the Children't Guide to Critical Thinking to explore the three types of thinkers: Naive Nancy, Selfish Sam, and Fairminded Fran.  We evaluated each based on the 5 standards of thinking and used our role-model, Fran as a critical thinking exemplar!

In math, we played Some Sum where students used the randomly drawn digits 0-9 to build an addition problem with the largest answer.  We also flipped the strategy to build the smallest sum. Students used their knowledge of place value and the commutative property to find all the possible winning combinations for each round.

The most fun activity of the day was creating our Nerd sculptures.  Each student selected an element of creativity to demonstrate in their art.

The elaborate rainbow nerd.

This flexible cherry nerd with a leaf umbrella.

Time Travel

Standards of Thinking were our group focus this morning as we tuned in to The Children's Guide to Critical Thinking videos to learn the basic characteristics of critical thinkers.  We took notes and looked at examples of the five traits...fair, relevant, clear, logical, and accurate!

For math, second graders tackled the place value game, Card Capers by trying to use digits 0-9 to create a number closest to the round's target number.

For the bulk of our day, students were called on to help me with a slight dilemma where they used their learning to come through with flying colors!  Our ancient civilization time travel mystery served as a culminating event for this unit and we look forward to starting on exploring through problem solving when we are back together after the break!