Our trip to The Mountain School Sugar House

Hiking to the sugar house.

A rest break turned into rolling down the hill!

A bucket-lined walk down to the sugar house.

  

At the sugar house we broke into three groups:

1. Sam explains the process of turning sap into syrup.

It involves lots of evaporation!

2. We helped collect sap from the buckets.

3. We made observations and drawing of the sugarbush.

All that work made us hungry for lunch.
A big thanks to The Mountain School for hosting us.

The NEW Hood Museum

We're sugaring at Westshire School!

                          Sam from The Mountain School showed us the equipment                               needed for gathering sap from maple trees.

Tapping the tree.

Tasting the sap.

Hanging the buckets.

Maggie  brought stethoscopes for us to listen for the sound of sap rising.
Some of us thought we heard some movement.

Checking the buckets.

In less than two days we gathered about ten gallons of sap! We sent the sap to The Mountain School where we will see how it is boiled and turned to maple syrup.

                               A Big Thanks to Sam and Maggie who have helped us on                          every step of our sugaring adventure!

Bee Bots and I Love to Read Week!

Ms. Martino brought the Bee Bots this week for us to  program.  After we explored how to make them move we tried some tasks to make the bot move in  letter patterns.  through trial and error groups had to work together.  We will to continue to explore next week!

I Love To Read Week!

It was fun reading Dr. Seuss books to our first grade reading buddies!

Then we had a Reader's Lunch for those who completed the
Winter Vacation Reading Challenge.
Congratulations Readers!

Spanish and Technology

We are fortunate to have Mountain School students join us to teach us Spanish. They taught us words for colors, numbers, animals and other Spanish words. 

Ms. Martino has introduced us to coding. Here we have to figure out how to tell, through a series of commands, how to get the bee to the flower.  We discovered each level got progressively trickier. Our challenge this week was to make a map of the program we use to move the bee. Next week she will be bringing in Bee Bots for kids to actually program! 

Using a spinner and coin combinations we had to add coins and make exchanges to see who was the first to get to one dollar. It was an exciting game as we got close to the end!   In math all week we will be shopping, showing coin combinations to buy things and to practice counting up to make change. Having your children practice identifying  and counting coins at home would be beneficial.  Thanks!

One Hundred Days of School Celebration! and Native American Legends

            Some brought collections of 100 items and took inspiration from the movie UP! 

  

                   Playing a dice game called Race to 100 on a hundreds chart helped us practice our addition skills to 100.                     

We have begun a literacy project reading Native American legends from various geographical locations around our country. Here we are working on posters to retell the story The Rough Faced Girl by Rafe Martin. 

Rivendell Winter Program and The Hood Museum is Open!

Arrow Cards are a new math tool we used to learn about place value. Two end of year second grade standards are to demonstrate an understanding of whole numbers 0-999 and uses place value to add and subtract two digit numbers.

We were very excited to use chrome books this month!  We learned how to log into our Rivendell account and are presently using the Dance Mat 2 program to learn keyboarding skills.  A link to this program can be found on the upper right corner on this blog along with the other links we have explored.

Mr. Driscoll and I went to the opening of the Hood Museum this weekend.  It was amazing! Next Sunday you are invited to  a free Family Day event!  We will be going as a class in April.