Thank you grade two for an excellent year. I hope you feel like you have learned about taking care of yourself, taking care of others, and how to take care of places and spaces around you. I know I have learned a great deal from all of you.
Enjoy your summer and remember to read and write every day as these skills become better with practice. Good luck in grade three! Yesterday we participated in a day called Hats On For Mental Health. We all wore hats to school and have been talking about healthy brains, thoughts,
Students gathered in small groups and created a skit about taking care of themselves and taking care of others (connections to two of our school pillars). They developed characters, speaking parts, props, a story problem and solution. There are the scenes and skits that children created: 1. Two bullies are throwing snowballs at you after school. What do you do? Does someone come and help you? 2. Students are leaving school at the end of the day. One student reaches out and takes the hat of another student and runs away. What should the students who lost her/his hat do? Will someone come to help? 3. Students are eating their lunch. One student stops eating to visit the washroom. While he is gone, another student takes his lunch. The student comes back from lunch to find his lunch gone. What does the students do? Who helps him? 4. Children go outside for recess. One child comes back into the classroom to discover that her pencils and erasers are gone. She searches the classroom and asks others if they have seen anything. What else can the student do? Will anyone help? 5. A few kids are playing soccer and a bully comes and steals the soccer ball. The bully trips on a tree root as he runs away and drops the ball. What can the students do who lost their soccer ball? We encourage you to talk with your children about healthy thoughts and encourage you to let them know if they are concerned about something, that you are a safe person with whom they can talk. Can We Talk is a website full of resources for children, parents, and teachers about supporting our own and others mental health. We wanted to thank the family members who attended our Celebration of Learning last week. Students worked for months learning about different places across Canada and were able to represent their learning through art and writing in an exceptional way. ![]() We learned about communication techniques in Canada's North. The Inuit people who live in Canada's north, including in Nunavut, have constructed Inuksuk's for hundreds of years. These structures built from stone, and nothing else, are built by people to share messages with others. Some Inuksuit are meant to hold meat over the winter, some are to point the way for safe travels, and others share a great fishing spot. We learned about 10 different Inuksuit, drew them, then constructed them out of felt rocks. ![]() We were able to obtain historic Inuit tools from the University of Calgary. After we noticed the details of each artifact, we drew what we saw instead of what we thought we saw. We then asked and wondered about the tools, including:
Once again, thank you for coming to our Grade Two Celebration of Learning, and we hope you enjoyed your visit with us as we showed you our learning process! - Grade 2 Students and Teacher We partnered with our local art studio in Edgemont, 4Cats Art Studio, and we had the opportunity to paint like Impressionists. Using acrylic paint and individual canvases we had the opportunity to paint and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. ![]() Over the past few weeks we have taken the opportunity to learn about a particular style of painting called Impressionism. We have learned about this French art movement, the artists who painted in this way, and why and how they created their art (link: Tate Museum, Impressionism). ![]() These artists changed people's perspectives of art as they painted every day things and people, using short brush strokes and a great deal of paint. They wanted to convey the emotions and feelings of a place, emphasizing light and colour, rather than depicting a realistic view of the world around them. ![]() After we learned and shared our understanding of Impressionism with each other, we were ready to paint like the artists. Our own art experiment began with water colour paper and oil pastels. We chose an everyday object to draw, then used our fingers and tissue to smudge the colours giving it a more Impressionist look. Once we practiced our drawing Impressionist skills, we were ready to go to our local art gallery to experience art with Acrylic paint and canvases. We headed to 4Cats Art Studio for an exciting continuation of our learning. As part of our math curriculum as have been learning about 2 dimensional shapes (2D) and 3 dimensional objects (3D), and ways in which they are connected to shape and space. In grade two we focus on 2D shapes including circles, squares, rectangles, and triangles; 3D objects include cube, sphere, cone, cylinder, and pyramid. This year we extended our learning and included rectangular prisms and triangular prisms as students demonstrated such enthusiasm for shapes and objects. As we continued learning about Canada and the different ways in which people live across our country, we decided to create an Acadian village using the fine motor skills we had developed through our shape and space work. We learned about 3D nets and proportion as we selected the correct size of object to be combined to make the buildings one would find in a traditional Acadian Village. We used research tools such as websites, books, Youtube, and shared knowledge to learn more about a time period very different from our own. Then using these tools to learn about a life in the 17th and 18th centuries, a time that was very different from the life we lead. The most challenging ideas we had included people making and growing what they needed to survive, living with a trade based economy, and a life without electronics. Students often wondered what did the Acadian people do for fun without electronics? As a class we decided each person would plan, make, and contribute a specific building to our town. We chose our 3D nets, built and combined them, discussed how to differentiate buildings, then added additional art based pieces to our town in order to ensure it looked like an Acadian village art installation. We are excited to share our Acadian Village with you during parent conferences next week as we play the part of art installation curator with our parents and families. Great work grade two students! The grade two ELL teams have been focusing on developing descriptive language through looking at the features and special characteristics of the prairie. We are learning new more specific, and powerful words to talk about things like the sun, cold, wind and trees. As well, we are trying to experiment with language to paint pictures in people's minds and create different moods with use of simile and personification.
- Mrs. Shim Thank you Mrs. Shim for all you hard work with our students! They are always excited to work with you as they deepen their understanding of our social studies curricular content. - Ms. Bates As part of our exploration of liquids in science we performed an experiment using water, cooking oil, and salt. We combined water and cooking oil in the same container, observed how they settled, then talked about the weight of liquids. We then took turns dropping salt into the settled mixture, observed, and wrote about what we saw. Students noticed:
These observations led us to talk about the salt being coated in oil as it passed through this layer. As the salt passed through the water then settled on the bottom of the container, we noticed the air bubbles often contained oil that was rising above the water as cooking oil is lighter than water.
We were able to use this experiment to practice documenting our work as scientists. We wrote about materials we used, created a hypothesis, wrote down observations, and completed a conclusion after comparing our results to our hypothesis. Students demonstrated their skills and really enjoyed learning more about one of our most important materials, water. - Ms. Bates' Class |
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June 2017
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