Decomposer Scavenger Hunt

Grade 2 headed off to Heartland Forest for a field trip on Friday to check out God's Recycling Plan in action.    Thanks so much to the brave moms who were willing to go bug-hunting with us! 

Armed with clipboards, magnifying glasses, colour charts and shovels, students headed off to turn over rotting logs and search for decomposers like earthworms, spiders, ants, millipedes, slugs, moss and fungi.  We also spotted squirrels, salamanders and even a snake!

It was such a beautiful afternoon for a hike in the woods!   God's recycling plan in action brings new life from death.    Students have been learning this cheer:
Plants are producers
Animals consumers
Decomposers live on things dead
The cycle continues
From death there is life
Our God is a Hero of Hope - Hooray!

Hands-on Minds-on Learning

Being "hard at work" in math class looks different every day! Yes, some days mean math fact speed drills, but there's much more variety to our program.  Below students worked in groups to match numerals to the written forms of numbers and an array of pictures.

Students can use our number line as a math tool to skip count. 

We've begun using interactive Math Journals to keep key definitions and information in a place we can refer to throughout the year.  

 

Early on in this unit students began working on filling in a 100 chart with numbers they found in newspaper flyers.  The 100 chart is another tool that helps students recognize the patterns they see in numbers.

 A dice rolling game where we tried to get up to 100 and used pennies, nickels and dimes to help us keep track of how many points we've collected.  Many students are not very familiar with coins these days since we use so much "plastic", so clean out your coin jars and let them practice counting by 1's, 5's, 10's, and 25's. 

In our Creation Studies unit we wondered why God doesn't have to pick up his own garbage (dead plant materials like leaves and twigs and berries etc)?  So, we watched a video on God's Recycling Plan and learned about decomposers and then "enjoyed" a decomposition dessert .... worms and dirt anyone??

Finally we drew some of the decomposers themselves, like earthworms, millipedes, earwigs and fungi. 

Welcome Back!

We have had a good first week in Grade Two! We were happy to welcome 4 new friends to our class this year! Here's a little of what we've been up to in the last week:

First day class photo

A class web to show how God's gift of water, air and soil all work together. 

Without one, the web collapses. 

Some community building activities in our first gym class. 

We had a "snowball fight" on the first day of school!

Yesterday we made some fudge. Yum!

Working together to make up new games using equipment given to them:

Having two classrooms and separating into 2 groups for half the day is working out really well. We are enjoying being together as a large group for some of the day and also benefiting from small group work as well. It's the best of both worlds!

We are enjoying getting to know each other and are working together at building community this month as well.