Erosion Explosion!!!

As a erosion culminating activity, students are creating and publishing their very own ebooks.  Students are working in teams to answer the following questions: What is erosion?  What are the types of natural forces that cause erosion?  What are the processes of erosion (fast and slow)?  How is erosion effecting Hawaii's beaches and local people?  and what are possible solutions to solve the erosion problem?  One member from each team answers a different question.  Each of the 2nd grade teachers took on one focus question and students from various classes assigned to particular questions, went to the respective teacher.  In this way, students got to work with new 2nd graders and had a different teacher for the duration of this activity!  Teams will come back together with the new information to complete their ebook using Book Creator.  Using this jigsaw strategy, students learn that they have to rely on their peers, engage and interact in order to be successful.  Students see that in this situation, working together is important and necessary.   

Here is a summary of what happened in our classroom:

​In Langauge Arts... 

• Continuing from last week, the essential question was What do good citizens do? Students read Grace for President by Kelly DiPucchio.  This story was about a girl named Grace who learns that there has never been a girl president.  So she is determined to the the first girl president.  Her teacher decides to hold a class election.  The following day Grace finds out Thomas Cobb, the spelling B champ, science fair winner, and captain of the soccer team, is also running for president.  Using this story, students continued to learn how to identify different characters' point of view.  The focus standard addressed this week was 2.RL.6 Acknowledge differences in the points of view of characters, including by speaking in a different voice for each character when reading dialogue aloud.​

• Later, we started the next week's unit.  The essential question was How do people get along?  Using the story Soccer Friends by Wonders, students determined different points of view of the characters and discussed how they changed from the beginning of the story to the end.  

• Students are on their draft 1 or 2 of their opinion writing.  They're learning how to elaborate on their ideas and summarize their opinion to form a strong conclusion.  

In Math... 

• We continued to learn about multiplication, by adding equal groups.  But also students learned to describe arrays as equal groups as well.  Students learned the difference between a row and a column and learned how to describe the array using a addition sentence and a multiplication sentence.  Students understand that the multiplication symbol means 'groups of'.  So depending on the multiplication story, it makes a huge difference where the numbers are placed.  For example, three baskets with 5 apples in each basket, should be writing only as 3 x 5 = 15 not 5 x 3 = 15.  ​

• After a quick review of polygons, students were introduced to polyhedrons.  Students learned that, unlike polygons, polyhedrons are 3D.  They only have straight edges and only have flat faces.  Students learned that pyramids are a type of polyhedron and they identified various pyramids.  
• Using their knowledge of faces, edges and vertices, students analyzed and recorded information about various 3D objects.  

In Social Studies... 

• We read a story called The Goat in the Rug by Charles L. Blood & Martin Link.  In this story students learned how a Navajo weaver uses her traditional native methods to make a rug.  She uses a number of resources, including her goat's wool, berries for dye, hammers, looms, and combs.  Students learned the difference between natural, human and capital resources.  Then students classified all the resources that were used in making the rug.