Butterfly Bonanza

Hello Families-

We've had a fabulous week of learning here in Room 17. This week, we welcomed Jerry Schneider, a local butterfly expert, to teach us about butterflies of Vermont and their roll in pollination. Mr. S taught us how to tell the difference between male and female butterflies, their symbiotic relationship with flowers, and the difference between moths and butterflies. He showed us a slideshow of butterflies from Vermont, as well as the Monarch Butterfly migration to South America. Then, we got to design our very own t-shirts!
How to Take Care of Your Butterfly T-Shirt
1. Put your t-shirt in the drier on hot for approximately 10 minutes. This will set the dye.
2. Wash your t-shirt in cold water and dry as normal.
3. Enjoy!

This week in math, we played new games that have us computing with 3 and even 4 digit numbers! We played a game called Sum it Up in which students needed to strategically place numerals in place value spots in order to make a larger or smaller number. It was amazing it see how many mathematicians could add numbers in to the 1,000's!

Save the Date
This Tuesday is our poetry celebration! We will be hosting families from 12:15-12:45 in our classroom and showcasing our wonderful work from our poetry unit. We will then travel outside (fingers crossed) to our School Picnic at 12:45. We hope to see you there!


Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Choosing a series book to become an expert at
- More Neighbor Numbers
- Our hidden picture grid activities
- Completing our very last assessments!
- Farm to School- Pea Shoots

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly

Graffiti Math Board Fun!

Hello Families-

We've had a fabulous week of learning here in Room 17. This week in math, we continued our work with story problems in a new way. Mrs. Jensvold visited our classroom this week and taught us about a different way to show math thinking- graffiti boards! This looks like a problem up on a piece of chart paper and students with colorful markers solving these problems, reading one other's work and leaving feedback. We then used these graffiti boards to practice telling the difference between put together (or how many in all) and comparing problems (or how many more/fewer). Then, we used these strategies to solve stories problems that our classmates had written. Here is our work!

This week, we were also very lucky to have Mr. Eric von Wettberg in to our school to teach us even more about plants and pollination. Eric taught us about roots of plants and how different components of soil support the growth of plants. We found nodules on the end of roots and learned that these nodules help to deliver nutrients that plants need. Here is our exploration of plants.

We ended our week with a field trip to the UVM Horticultural Farm. This farm produces fruit that feeds our own community! During this field trip, we were able to watch bees pollinating apple blossoms and then got a close up view of both live and pinned bees. We even got to see a real live queen bumble bee! It was a great day to be outside seeing the real life power of pollinators.

Save the Date!
We will be having our end-of-the-year writing celebration 30 minutes before the 2nd grade school picnic day- Tuesday June 4th from 12:15-12:45pm. We welcome all family members to join us and read our fabulous work!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Middle School Jazz Concert
- Our nonfiction flip books
- Our last week of word study
- George Brown, Class Clown
- Our new science stations: Busy, Buzzy Bees & Moving On

Have a wonderful long weekend!
Kelly

Becoming Pollination Experts

Hello Families-

We've had a wonderful week full of learning here at Rick Marcotte Central School. On Monday, we were lucky to have beekeeper Jen Savas in to our school to teach us about how honeybees make honey and help with the pollination process. We learned that it takes a lot of hard work to make even the tiniest bit of honey. Jen even brought in some samples of her own bee's honey for us to try!

We also had the opportunity to do some more planting of our own with Amy Simone, master gardener. We helped to plant kale and chard in our school's garden. We planted our seeds, covered them with hay and then watered then. Mrs. Simone even watered us :)

We've continued our plant, seed and pollination study during science workshop through new science stations including Like Fruit? Thank a Bee, Plant Parts, What do Plants Need to Grow? and Flower Power. During these stations, students have lots of academic choice. Students can choose what short text to read or video to watch, what kind of questions they want to answer and what activity they want to complete to show their understanding. We've been having a blast! Ask your child about their favorite station!

Save the Date
Our end-of-the-year Poetry Writing Celebration for families is on Tuesday, June 4th beginning at 12:15pm (30 minutes prior to our school picnic). We look forward to seeing all that can attend!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Using a line plot to show our height
- Color Poetry
- Blackout Poetry
- Writing toy store picture problems

Have a wonderful week!
Kelly

Finding Math Everywhere!

Hello Families-

We've had a fantastic week of learning here in second grade. This week, we began our final unit in math that around 3-digit computation and story problems. This week, we did solved several different problems involving a toy store. Some of our problems involved spending money (ie. If you spent $23.00 exactly, what did you buy?), while others involved tracking inventory (ie. There were 129 Frisbees in the store. The truck delivered some more. Now there are 315. How many did the truck deliver?, and still others looking at parts of the toys (ie. If you can see 26 ears, how many teddy bears would there be?). We worked on making mathematical models that demonstrate our thinking clearly so that others can figure out what we did. We even gave feedback to our peers- check this out in your child's Friday Folder!

We were also lucky to start our week looking at real life math problem solving by taking a trip to Folino's Pizza in Burlington. On this field trip, we did some "restaurant math", figuring out how many pizza's we'd need to cook for the number of students wanting the different types of pizzas. Then, Folino's shared with us information about the 52 Kids Foundation that they support. This foundation provides materials and resources for a school in Uganda. Our class was super interested in hearing all about the differences and similarities of the two different schools. Finally, while our chefs prepared lunch, we did some independent math problems- all that were straight from situations at Folino's!  What a wonderful way to bring math to life!

Save the Date!
Our End-of-the-Year Writing Celebration will be 30 minutes before our lunch time on Tuesday, June 4th. All family are invited to attend and celebrate our year of hard work :) Once we get our final time for lunch, I will share more details!

Other Things to Ask Your Child About:
- Creating a semantic web in nonfiction reading
- Race to the Cookie Jar
- Our new Calendar- finding Joey!
- Using repetition to make meaning in our poetry
- Planting our pollinator garden

Have a wonderful weekend!
Kelly