When Learning Explodes...

Wow! What a week in grade 2 Dynamite! We really had a learning explosion! This week we began researching the countries the boys selected as part of our cultural diversity inquiry. They really put their thinking caps on, and I honestly have been listening to the sound of their "wheels" turning since Wednesday. We started taking notes using Culturegrams, which are information files and images about a country. Our goal is to get 2 facts under each heading. Once we have all the research done, we will make mini-books about each country so we can all learn more about the cultural diversity in our very own class. The research process is a challenging one for grade 2 students, but the growth in their skills over this last week was nothing short of remarkable! Many of the boys are already becoming confident with finding facts and recording them. We also spent some time in the computer lab selecting some of the images we will include in our mini-books. The boys dragged images from google into a word document and shifted them around on a page so they will be able to cut them and add them into their mini-books.
In art, Mrs. Buchanan read the boys a wonderful non-fiction book about what it means to be an artist in different parts of the world. The boys had lots of connections and were so thrilled to see so many of their "origin countries" in the book. This led into their next art project, which is making papier mache calabashes. We were very sticky and gooey!
In math, we put our data collecting hats on and compiled all the countries that we all come from. We then sorted them by continent and made bar graphs to represent the results. We learned that collectively, we come from 5 different continents, and that we are a very diverse group.
Finally, we began rehearsing a short play about diversity that we will present next Friday morning (Oct. 2) for Friday Morning Live. It is "taking shape" quite nicely. You'll know what I mean by "taking shape" when you see us next Friday!