Family Matters: Science Experiments to Celebrate Mother's Day and Father's Day

I'm squuueeeezzzing this one in right under the wire - a matter resource designed to help your kids understand how matter (solid, liquid and gas) changes AND give you some usable gifts for Mother's Day or Father's Day (or just Loved One's Day!). :) 

One of my favorite experiments is this liquid viscosity experiment (which ties in to a "breakfast in bed" motif).

I designed this experiment knowing that one of the toughest things to understand about solids is that things like salt, sugar and flour are all solids - they're just verrrrrryyy small pieces - they don't "flow" like liquid, they tumble!

Kids will explore gas properties by blowing bubbles ...

And learn about melting solids by making a crayon sun catcher! 

Just a little taste of what's inside (you can see the table of contents above!) - pop on over to my store if you're interested in seeing more! 

Choose Your 'Tude: Neutral or Happy

As I've shared when I introduced my "hook" for motivating boys with "Motivation Madness," character education is on my mind as we roll into the end-of-year festivities.

I wanted to share two things I use that work pretty well for me. First, "neutral or happy." This is a fairly simple concept, but it really cuts down on something that all second graders need help overcoming: the pout. You know ... the bottom lip pokes out, the nose wrinkles, eyebrows lower ... feet stomp, shoulders slump ... etc. I help my kids understand this with a simple phrase - "neutral or happy." 

I explain at the beginning of the year that it's totally okay if we don't feel happy all the time. In fact, *I* don't feel happy all the time! {Especially when I don't get my cup of tea in the morning ... not nearly as cool as coffee, but it's my jam, man.}

Rather than pout, I keep a neutral or happy face and voice. If I am upset and need a moment, it's okay for me to close my eyes and count to three, but then ... neutral or happy. If I'm upset with a friend, first I get to a neutral or happy place and then I can use the peace window. 

Here's a little {FREEBIE!} poster I made up for the classroom - grab it from my TpT store if you like it, and leave some feedback for me! :) 

The second thing I wanted to share - morning meeting read-aloud. Every day in morning meeting we have a different topic (math, grammar, character ed., etc.). Wednesdays are the read-aloud days, and I try to make them books with a strong theme - if I'm really on top of things, a theme we're struggling with in class. Common Core Standard RL.2? BAM. {Ha. Too much?}

This week we'll be reading Maya Was Grumpy by Courtney Pippen Mathur to discuss ... grumpiness. We all get up on the wrong side of the bed sometimes. {Especially when it's light for so long and our bodies don't let us get enough sleep. ahemMs.BBZahem} This is the story of a little girl named Maya who just wants to be grumpy ... until her grandma comes up with a funny way to get her out of her funk.

The illustrations are BEAUTIFUL, and there are quite a few examples of alliteration and personification {what.do.you.know.that's.what.we're.studying.right.now} ... #integration. 

Add in a little watercolor technique and a craftivity? #doubleintegration

                  

Annyyyyway - the whole lesson plan set, art cards, templates and response sheets are up in my TpT store, so if you're so inclined - grab it! Either way, I highly recommend the book to chase away those grumpy days! :) 

The Crayon Box That Talked

On my visit to my former school, I walked through the halls and admired some of the leftover decorations from the International Festival they hold each year. Every classroom picks a country and studies it for a week (or more, depending on the teacher). On the last day, there's a big festival with food, celebrations and people from the community. Classrooms rotate around the "booths," learning about a different country every year. Among other things, last year we ate Eritrean cake, learned about steel drums from Jamaica and tried on wooden shoes in Holland.

I *love* some of the fun character and and multicultural education lessons they do as a lead-up to the festival. One great lesson is the integrated literature / character education / art lesson from the {wonderful} art teacher. First she reads The Crayon Box that Talked by Shane Derolf - it's the *cutest* poem about diversity, with the crayons all learning that they work together to create a bigger picture, and ask, "What would happen if there were only one color in the crayon box?"



Then she teaches them the basics of a self-portrait, and they draw themselves on a crayon that they add to a big crayon box she's made for the wall. The result is beautiful!

The {wonderful} art teacher also makes other beautiful displays. Check out her Pinterest account if you want to see more of her inspiration ...  Here are a few of my other favorites from around the school ...

Study Notebooks: Space!

Every quarter we keep track of our learning in our social studies or science unit, and share them at our Community Night. What I love most about our notebooks is that they accumulate and make a wonderful record of the learning and growth that child has made over the time that they've been at our school.

We start with a blank Bare Book, and slowly add either journal entries, activities or diagrams. When it's complete, we decorate the cover with a fun design that represents that quarter's work. Since I've shared all our moon work {here, here, and here}, it's clear our last unit had to do with space. Soooo .... our cover was the night sky and moon! 

I was excited to try this technique I saw on Pinterest. The author calls it "puffy paint ..." I call it FUN!!

First you take a big dollop of shaving cream, and add some glue: 

You take some construction paper (we used light blue to give it some color), and smear it around! 

It only takes a couple of hours to dry, and then you can cut it into any shape you want! 

For the background of our books we used a dry tempera pat to create a wash, and then we used a tissue to wipe most of it off: 

When it was dry, we added some glitter paint and wrote the names and ... voila! The adorable covers, each one slightly unique. 

Inside ... our learning! We started the unit by visiting NASA's space station site for kids - we learned what a day in the life of an astronaut would be like, then we made our own packing list: 

We started waayyyyy out in space, and made acrostic poems about galaxies:

 

Then we moved in a little and studies constellations, using two AWESOME resources that I HIGHLY recommend - first we activated our schema and learned about constellations with the "Solar System Spectacular" unit by Lesson Plan SOS, and after we'd learned a little about them, we created our own with the ingenius "Graphing the Constellations" packet from Anna Colley.

After constellations, we moved onto stars, learning about their brightness, color, and life cycle using my "Stars" unit.

 

 

We zoomed into our solar system, learning about our own sun and it's characteristics - the layers of the sun and movement through the sky, as well as its effect on shadows and seasons. 

  

Fiinnnaaallly we started our moon work - we debunked ten "moon rumors" with my "Moon Misconceptions" unit - all of which are documented here, here, and here. OH! And we used the totally adorable oreo cookie activity from Yvonne Dixon's "Sun, Moon, Earth ..." unit, and the ADORABLE moon and earth craftivity from Leah Abatiell's "Mr. Moon" unit. I wish I had pictures! 

Have you seen this little poem? So helpful! 

We culminated our unit with our Community Night, packed it all up and started all over again the next week! Onto ENERGY, forces and motion and MATTER. Bring it on, science! :) 

Community Share Night: Looking Up ..

Every quarter at my school, we present all the learning we've done in our social studies/science unit for that quarter. We all have a theme we focus on, and then center several presentations around this theme. This quarter the theme is "Looking Up ..." and our grade level learned all about the stars, sun, moon, and earth. I LOVED it - I taught in North Carolina for the last four years, and was always jealous of the all the fun things teachers did with the space theme. Lucky for me, it's a second grade standard in Georgia!

For this community night, every grade level creates several presentations - either visual, musical, or theatrical arts. We usually do a combination of all these - two to three visual presentations and a performance or two - maybe a reader's theater, song, or video presentation the kids have worked on. This time we have three visual walls and the kids will sing a song at the end of the night. Specifically, one of the songs from Kids Know It - have you seen this site before? So cute. We'll be singing, "The Color of a Star," but there are a TON of other songs that can add a little spice to the classroom. {Especially for non-musical people like me!}

Our first presentation wall is centered on the life cycle of a star. The kids all created a 3D home project, and brought it in this Monday for the wall. All I can say is oh. my. gosh. The creativity! They always blow me away with their at-home projects. A few examples -- 

That ball in the upper right-hand corner? It's a pulsar and it blinks. :) 

The student who made this one called it a "glitter bomb." :) 

Love the use of a balloon as a red giant here. : ) 

Personally, I think THIS one is the glitter bomb.

We took projects from all the classes and mounted them onto the wall ... 

One of our other walls is a presentation of the sun - complete with our own sun mosaics, a 3D representation of the sun, our mobile Sun-Earth-Moon projects, as well as the pictures from our cantaloupe sun projects. {Pinterest idea, yes!} The only things we don't have up yet are the labels for the layers of the sun. 

No labels yet, but we'll get there! 

Have you seen the sun layers project circling around Pinterest? Too cute! All we needed were a few cantaloupes cut in half, toothpicks, and sticky white labels. We labelled the core, radiative zone, convection zone, chromosphere, photosphere, corona and sunspots/solar flares. The kids loved it - and we had a spirited debate about which part of the cantaloupe should be labelled the radiative zone vs. convection zone. I wish I could find the source of this idea, but the link doesn't lead back to a site! Boo. 

I'll be back soon withe pictures from the rest of our night!