Mrs. Sawyer loves teaching us about technology! We have these cool tools that let us communicate and collaborate together on the ActivBoard.
Monday, April 27, 2015
Saving Natural Resources!
We had a great program today about natural resources and saving energy. Please sign up to receive your energy saving kit in the mail. It comes with a special treasure for the kids and it enters our school into a drawing to win $10,000. It is completly free!
Saturday, April 25, 2015
Duck Parenting
Duck parenting can be tough business! We are learning all about how to care for our ducklings. We have been busy researching the best way to care for our duck eggs to make sure that their hatchability is high. We learned that hatchability is how likely it is that an egg will hatch. These are some important things we have found -
This is a video of egg # 7 on day 8! You can see him/her moving around inside the egg!
Duck eggs need to mantain a constant temperature of 99.5 degrees farenheit.
The humidity in the incubator should be around 55. We had to think back to our science unit on the water cycle to remember what humidity meant. Humidity is how much water (or moisture) is in the air. This happens when water evaporates into the air after condensation. Because of this, we have to add water to our incubators each day. We use a tool called a hygrometer to measure the humidity.
Placing water in the incubator to make sure our humidity is just right!
We need to spin the ducks each day. This is because the mother duck moves around while the eggs are under her tummy. She gets up and down. If we don't spin the eggs, they may not grow properly. We put an x and an o on each side of the so we know where they should be turned next. We labeled our ducks #1-12 so we can monitor their growth in the egg.
We need to mist our eggs with water each day. Ducks LOVE the water! When a mother duck gets up and down to swim or drink water, she leaves her eggs for a little bit. When she comes back, she may still have water on her feathers, causing the eggs to get wet. We also learned that eggs are porous, meaning that air or water may get in through the egg, even though it has a hard shell.
Today was our first day candling the duck eggs. We believe that 7 of our 12 duck eggs may have baby ducklings growing inside. Each of them are Runner ducks. We have some Pekin duck eggs also, but we don't believe any of those have babies inside.
Candling duck #7. Thank you, Ms. Shaw, for letting us use your classroom to candle the eggs! Her room is nice and dark.. Perfect candling conditions! We were amazed at what we saw!
Recording our observations. Scientific data is so important! We have to monitor everything very closely!
Friday, April 24, 2015
Perimeter
Along with Measurement we are learning about perimeter. Here is a chart we made finding the perimeter of a rectangle. 
Here is a song about perimeter by The Bazillions. We love them!
Kid Blog
We love blogging about all we are learning in 2nd grade! Please check out our recent posts on life cycles!
Our expectations for blogging are that we must blog about something we are learning. Each post should be at least 4 complete sentences. We are getting better every day! I look forward to seeing all your posts. You may blog at home for extra class dojo points! You can follow the link below to access our blog.
http://kidblog.org/MsParrissClass/
Wednesday, April 22, 2015
Saturdays and Teacakes
We are working on writing stories from our memories. We are using the book Saturdays and Teacakes by Lester Laminack to guide us as we write. We thought about the whole book being a watermelon, and all the different parts being seeds. We are trying to reflect this in writing our own personal narratives!
Monday, April 20, 2015
Seesaw data projects!
These are a sneak peak of some of our data project pictographs we made using an app called Seesaw. There are many more to come, so check back at the end of the week if you don't see anything in your child's folder yet. I emailed everyone an invitation to view their child's work. Please let me know if you didn't get one! We will be doing more work on this through out the end of the year.
I apologize for the pictures being side ways! They should appear normal on Seesaw.
Hatching Ducklings
Last Wednesday, a mystery package was delivered to our classroom. After a little investigating, we were so excited to learn that we had an incubator used for incubating baby ducklings! We are getting ready to begin our life cycle unit, so our incubator couldn't have come at a more perfect time. We wanted to get started right away! I went to a farm to pick up 12 duck eggs. The next day, we placed our eggs in the incubator and began our journey to becoming adoptive duck parents. 🐣
We know that we have a lot to learn before our ducklings hatch! We need to learn about their life cycle and their development inside the egg. We have to to learn how an incubator acts as a mother duck so that we are sure to get our incubator settings just right. We also need to learn how to care for our feathered babies after they hatch. Check back.. We will keep you posted on this blog and our kid blog about our adventure!
Saturday, April 18, 2015
We had a great time at the Children's Museum!
We loved learning all about science at the Children's Museum this week! A big thank you to all of our chaperones for making our trip so safe and fun!!!
