Bees and The Cool Crazy Crickets Club

This week the students learned many new interesting facts, mostly about bees. As it turns out, many of the activities and lessons this week had information about bees and what they do inside their hives. Together, we did an active reading lesson about bees using an article called Another Buzz for Bees, which discussed how bees are able to find flowers more easily if their nectar contains caffeine. This was a very difficult text, but I was quite impressed with how well the students were able to decode the main points in the article. Later in the week, we read a weekly reader that also was about bees which talked about how they make honey, and about their life cycle. The students were asked to work on using what they know about bees to answer questions and write a paragraph with their main idea, details and conclusion. The second graders seemed to really enjoy learning about bees as many of them did not like them. Now that they know more about bees and why they are important (mainly for helping flowers grow), they have more positive attitudes towards them.


In math this week we talked about intersecting versus perpendicular line segments. This was tricky for the students at first since they can look very similar. The one rule about perpendicular lines that helped the students understand was that they intersect at a right angle. We discussed what things in everyday life have perpendicular lines, such as the wall of a building, the corner of a piece of paper and even their desks. The students also began learning multiplying  by 3 facts this week and will continue to practice them through the rest of the year.

Our reading unit this week was a  focus on chapter books. The students finished Cool Crazy Crickets near the end of the week and we discussed how the plots were different in each chapter and how they combined together to create the entire story. The students also had the chance to create their own chapter in the story for what would happen next. Many of the students created a chapter about having someone new join the character's club and what would happen afterwards.

We started our Colonial State studies in social studies as the students will be observing different facts about the original 13 colonies. They get to look at pictures, maps and other artifacts from each colony and create their own labeled map of the colonies. In science the students took the Soil Unit test and were also able to do some labs involving how soils hold water and what types of grains soils have.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend!

-Laura Hill