Martin Luther King Jr. and a Week in Review

Happy 2016! We have had an amazing start to the new calendar year. It was great to come back from Winter Break and share our stories with our friends. We found that we were all very busy with our friends and families! 

Now that we are back in the swing of things, it is time to take it to the next level.

Your child may have informed you that he/she is no longer a 2nd grader and has graduated to a 3rd grader in training. That is a big promotion and with it comes a new level of learning. 

We started our new level of learning with a Martin Luther King Jr. study and we focused on the theme of Kindness. 

We began our study by learning from 3 different video sources that can be found on our resources page.  

We also used other online resources like PebbleGo to gather as much information as we could. 

After we learned, discussed, reflected, and shared... 

We began to put our new learning into our own words. 

We have worked hard to share our feelings about Martin Luther King's message on our blogs. Please go in and check them out. The students would love to hear from you. Please consider leaving a comment or two (or three).

You will find our posts on our KidBlog Page:

https://kidblog.org/class/kbk200/posts

We also made a reflection video: (password same as always)

Untitled from LBright on Vimeo.

In addition to our Martin Luther King Jr. study, we had a few more exciting happenings in the last few weeks. 

One of our guided reading groups has been researching the process of growing plants. This week they put their new knowledge to the test. Hopefully we will have plants growing in the next few weeks. 

We are discussing solids and liquids in science. We explored the concept of volume this week. 

Science explorations are always an exciting time in Room 200. To the untrained eye, it could look like loud chaos. However, we know that it is educational, loud chaos! :) 

In this video you will see collaboration and each student purposefully executing their job within their group. You will see student engagement and excitement. If you can get past the giggling... you will also hear educational vocabulary!

Untitled from LBright on Vimeo.

We also had a great iMovie tutorial by our resident expert, H. V.. She did an amazing job showing us some new features she discovered in her own movie making! The kids were really excited to test the new feature. 

Room 200 celebrated our love of reading with a fabulous guest reader. She must have been reading my mind because she read us a dinosaur themed book on the day we began learning about the Titanosaur!

The Titanosaur is a newly discovered giant dinosaur. I found the article on CNN last week and we spent time reading and discussing the article. We also watched the correlating videos. 

We then put our new learning to work and began sketching and writing about the Titanosaur. We used images and pieces of the article to help us be as accurate as possible. 

We will be learning more about the Titanosaur this week. 

Last but not least, Room 200 recently participated in its first EdCamp. An EdCamp is a collaborative gathering where the participants get to decide the topics of study. On our first EdCamp we had groups discuss and sketch pirates, spend time on a fun (and controlled) Youtube channel called What's Inside, and a large group began exploring the Makey Makey. We had a blast and can't wait to do it again!

We will have another exciting week ahead of us. We are learning to count coin combinations in math, find evidence in non-fiction texts, and share a powerful opinion in writing. We are really moving now!

Have a great week!