Ms. Q's Blog

Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Sunday, April 17, 2011

The next two weeks are going to be very exciting and busy for everyone. Starting tomorrow we will begin our robotics unit. For the next two weeks the students will be concentrating on understanding how the robot works, programming and building. When they master that part they will have to use the robots to solve a problems posed to them. I anticipate it will be a lot of work, but also a lot of fun a and a fantastic learning experience.

The students have had an opportunity to do research on the Maritime provinces. They have been working in groups creating a poster about their province and the goal is to attract tourists to come visit their great province. They will eventually be making commercials to go along with their posters!

During their research the students discovered the diverse landscape of the Maritimes, so they each chose a landscape of their choice using google maps and used that picture to inspire their pastel art work they created last week. I’m happy to say the art looks fantastic and the students are now using the art to inspire them to write a story and even poetry!

In science we have been continuing our boat and buoyancy unit, doing a variety of experiments and tying it in with our inquiry with the East coast work.

The students have been challenging themselves in math. They have been using their own personal strategies to solve double digit addition problems. The new math curriculum encourages personal strategies, and using a variety of strategies to solve problems. As a class we have shared our strategies and attempted to use different ones to different problems. I have stressed to the students the importance of ‘sharing your thinking’ showing in pictures, words or number combinations on how they arrived at the answer. We have also started story problems, and the students have even been coming up with problems on their own! This week we will be focusing on double digit subtraction, it’s always a bit trickier than addition so I anticipate the students will share personal strategies just like when we did the addition problems.

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Stephanie

Friday, April 15, 2011

Overfishing links

How does over fishing affect the people in the Maritimes?

What is overfishing?

Problems with Fishing in Canada

Overfishing photos

Thursday, April 7, 2011

Sunday, April 3, 2011

Weekly Update

Hello parents and students!

I’m sorry for the delayed post, I’m afraid to say technology has not been on my side this week but luckily internet has decided to work consistently all weekend (yay!). I hope everyone had a great spring break, it was so relaxing (minus digging my car out of the snow today).

I’m excited that the students and I will be moving into our inquiry work with a new Canadian community. The focus now is on the Acadian communities of the East coast. Below are links related to Acadian culture and history but we are expanding on that and focusing also on current events in those places and how life is the same, but also different from us. I’m struggling a bit to find student friendly sites for the age group about current events and present life of Acadians but I’m going to extend my resource base and see what I can find in the next week or so. If anyone has anyone they could share with the class please let me know!

About the Acadians

Historical Acadian Village

Acadian history

Acadian map timeline

Information on the Acadians and the Mi'kmaq people

Interactive site about the Acadians

We’re working on our boats and buoyancy unit, it’s going to be a great link with our social studies inquiry work and I look forward to the experiments we can do in class!

As mentioned during interviews, I found a great math site that has activities related to the grade two curriculum, for students interested in doing some online math at home, these links are great and a lot of fun! I recommend checking them out to build on your math skills outside of the classroom.

Math link

Monday, March 14, 2011

Weekly Update

Hello parents and students!

I feel like it’s been ages since I’ve last updated, it’s been a busy few weeks for the students! We have been continuing with our prairie inquiry work, we have been taking a break from the past and focusing on the community around us. The students all chose a prairie animal that interested them and did some research. They created questions and write ups about the landscape, food, habitat and most important their size. We needed to know the size because the students were posed the challenge to make life sized animals! We have been doing our measurement unit in math and they put their skills to the test, it wasn’t easy but they managed to successfully recreate the animals! In art with Mrs. Hittel they then did some painting techniques to make it look even more realistic.

We have been doing a lot of work in measurement, using non-standard units of measurement, comparing and estimating. We have continued our work with a daily word problem and teh stduents onctinue to practice their mental math strategies.

In science we wrapped up our hot and cold unit and now we have started boats and buoyancy. This unit will be a lot of fun as there are plenty of experiments and problem solving tasks for the students to use their scientific inquiry skills!

The students have still been working on their prairie stories and poetry, when you come for sharing night have them share what they have done so far.

Have a great week, hopefully I will see everyone on Thursday!

Ms. Q