3-D Communities

 The students in my 2nd grade social studies class have been working on the geography of our community and maps. As a culminating activity, students took on the role of community planners and developed their own communities. Before we started the building, we had to do a lot of planning. (Thank you Hippo Hooray for 2nd Grade for the awesome idea and the community planning sheet freebie) We started out reviewing rural, suburban, and urban communities and what characteristics make them what they are. Then we made a list of important features of every community such as police station, fire station, hospital/doctor's office, school, grocery store, etc. Finally, once we finished our classroom community brainstorming, students completed their community planning sheet. This sheet gave them an outline to go by as they were constructing their communities and it was a nice formative assessment for me to evaluate if students completely understood the ideas we had learned.

Once the planning phase was complete, it was time to construct. This was an in class project; however, I did send a note to parents explaining the project and that their child may need to bring in some supplies from home to build their community. I let students be creative with their constructions and allowed their likes and personalities to come out in their projects. I did not limit their communities to humans only as inhabitants of the communities, which you can see in some of the photos taken. (The first photo is of a community named Taco Kitty Town. Community members include cats and mice.)

Overall, we had a lot of fun with this project and got to show off our community planning skills and knowledge. The students were so excited to take their projects home and show them off.


Ice Cream Town




Trapper Town- Community members live in
log cabins and trap and hunt for a living.

Gummy Bear Science

It has been a very long time since I have posted on our class blog. Apparently I need to work on my personal goal of posting at least once a week. This is a great way to share your child's day with you and the students love showing off the work they have done at school. 

In our class, we are science lovers. We love the inquiry and exploration involved with science. We love the hands-on aspect too! We recently finished one of my favorite science units...Matter!!! There are so many activities and experiments we do to explore the states of matter. One of those experiments is our gummy bear experiment. This experiment also involved learning about physical characteristics, mixtures, and solutions. 

Before I introduce the gummy bear experiment, we learn about physical characteristics I like to start off by passing out a gummy bear to every student and creating an anchor chart describing the physical characteristics of gummy bears. Of course at the end we have to explore how they taste. (our favorite part) After describing the physical characteristics, we discuss mixtures and solutions. Then I introduce our experiment. We worked in groups of 4 for this experiment (I try to work in groups whenever possible).  Each group received 4 clear cups filled half way with: vinegar, water, water and salt, water and baking soda. I labeled these cups with the contents and the group number. Each group also received 4 gummy bears (one for each student). Each student in the group was responsible for dropping their gummy bear in one of the cups. Before we dropped our gummy bears into the cups; however, we had to make our scientific predictions...our hypothesis,,, in our science journals. Most of us thought that the gummy bears would be mushy or dissolve in the liquids. Then on the count of three we dropped our gummy bears in the cups in our group. We observed for a couple of minutes and wrote any observations we had in our science journals. 

The next day we checked on our experiment. What we found was incredible. The gummy bears had expanded! We found that the gummy bears in the vinegar and the water cups expanded the most; however, the gummy bears in the water and salt cup and the water and baking soda cup did not expand as much. We wrote our observations down in our science journals. We took some photos of the gummy bears after our experiment. 

 

Gummy bear in vinegar vs. a regular gummy bear

Gummy bear in water vs. a regular gummy bear

                               Gummy bear in water with baking soda vs. a regular gummy bear

Gummy bear in water with salt vs. a regular gummy bear

                                                All of the gummy bears in our experiment:
                                               our control (regular) gummy bear, salt gummy bear,
                                               baking soda gummy bear, vinegar gummy bear, and
                                               water gummy bear.