Making Sense of Our 5 Senses

 This week the students finished presenting their research projects on the five senses to their classmates. 

We had presentations on the nose, tongue and skin.

In order to clarify many details from the students presentations, we inquired further into how the sense organs carry signals to the brain by spending more time sorting out labels and drawing our own diagrams for each organ. 

We also also simulated the sensory organs and  nervous system with the  students playing a telephone type game passing messages on to the brain. 

For homework, they will need to explain how two or more of the organs work by posting their diagrams into Seesaw and then record their explanations.

In math we started to wrap up our unit on geometry and are focusing more on numeracy. Today, we looked at different ways to represent a number - with numeral, words, equations and even drawings. 

Finally in PE we continued with new cooperative games such as leap frog and under the rainbow race. 

How Our Sense Organs Work

 This week the Grade 2 students spent most of their unit time working on their first group research project of the year. Each group of 3 or 4 students researched into one of the 5 senses. Each member had a responsibility; to draw a diagram of the sense organ, to record and define the different parts of the organ, and to find out and explain how the sense organ connects to the brain. 

To find out, the students searched for and watched videos that explained how the organs worked. Then they also searched for diagrams of the different sense organs that they could copy and dreaw themselves. The goal of the project was to find out how the sense organs work, and then teach the rest of the class about it through presentation.

Today, a couple of the groups were the first to present what they had learnt.

We will continue the presentations next Monday.

Finding Out About Our Senses

 This week in Grade 2 we began looking into our senses a bit deeper. As we inquired into how our senses and sense organs work. 

In order to be able to do some research on the computer, the students were introduced to a typing website called typing.com so that they can develop their keyboarding skills. We learnt about the home row keys, and made a connection (both physical and to our unit on senses) when we placed our fingers on the f and j keys as the students felt the raised line on the keys to help them remember where to place their fingers. This website will be one that they can use regularly as part of their homework, and will be featured in their homework grids in the coming weeks.

Today, the students began working in groups of three to research how one of the 5 sense organs works. Each group will be responsible for teaching the rest of the class about the different parts of the sensory organ that they researched as well as how that organ works and how it connects to the brain. We will continue working on these next week and should be ready to present by Thursday.

To help guide our inquiry, the students also added some questions that they have about the senses to our Wonder Wall!

We also practiced using our senses in a couple of activities. In class, the students used their sense of sight to look at and then describe a picture of an alien or monster that was drawn by a classmate. Their partner could only listen and wasn’t allowed to see the picture that their partner was describing, and had to try to draw the same monster/ alien. This gave the students a good chance to listen carefully as their partners needed to use many descriptive adjectives. Once complete, they compared the two images, and were told to focus on the positive things that were the same or correct about the drawings.

In PE, we continued with cooperative games. One game involved throwing balls at a ball in the center with four teams in each of the corners. The goal of the game was to knock the ball out of the center circle and into one of the other teams’ zones. It was a fun game that let the students work on their throwing skills and didn’t involve too much running so that we could try to avoid getting too hot!

We also started learning how to play a game called Goalball, which is played by blind or visually impaired athletes in the Paralympics. All players wear blindfolds and the game is played with a ball that has a bell inside and makes noise. Players have to try to roll it past the other team’s players and into a goal at the opposite end.

In math, we continued learning about 3D shapes and started learning how to draw some!

Finally, today was Shun’s birthday so we had a little celebration at lunch time. Thank you for the gifts  Shun! Have a great long weekend everyone!

Second Week in Second Grade

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This week we started putting our senses to the test as we did a number of games and activities that focused on our first line of inquiry, “How we use our 5 senses?”

During the unit time, the students were divided into 3 groups and had the chance to play 3 different games which focused on their senses of touch and sight. Some of the game activities were trying to match textured tiles with only their sense of touch, or to choose the object that had the same texture or shape as another. When it came to their sense of sight, sometimes they had to put a small puzzle together while blindfolded, or to put tangram tiles together to match a picture faster than the time it took their teammates to roll the same picture on the dice 3 times. Whichever game they played, they seemed to have a good time!

During PE, we continued to work on cooperative games. We actually played the same three games that we played last week - Over, Under Caterpillar, Loggers and Cross the River (except we changed the name to - The Floor is Lava!) and made them a bit more challenging by taking away some of the students’ senses! We used blindfolds to take away their eyesight, sound proof headphones to make it difficult to hear, and some big cooking mitts and gloves to limit their sense of touch to make it difficult to hold things. The goal of the games was not to win by being the first, but to be the team that could cooperate and communicate best and complete the tasks safely.

In discovering our 5 senses we also looked at the different words, or adjectives that we use to describe how something looks, feels, smells, sounds and tastes. We played a game called Baamboozle, that gives teams rewards for correctly answering question, but could also randomly penalize a team if they picked an unlucky number. All of the questions had to do with completing sentences about the 5 senses and it was fun. Because the game could randomly make one team swap points with another team, or jump into first place, I had the students agree that no one needs to feel bad or upset if they lost the game and they did really well with no one getting upset. They liked is so much that they asked to play again! (Maybe another day!)

In math, we moved on from the properties of 2D shapes to 3D shapes. The students were given various 3D shapes and asked to sort themselves into groups, based on something they could observe that was similar about their shapes. The groups then explained how they sorted themselves. 

One group was cylinders, because they had circles on top and borrow and a side that was curved, not flat. 

The second group had all sides that were squares or rectangles so they figured that they belonged together. 

A third group had shapes that had sides that all met at a point “like a pyramid”, said Kana. 

And the last group decided that they didn’t fit into the other categories so they made their own group.

This left just one student without a group. Her shape looked a bit like a pyramid, but although it had a couple triangular sides, they didn’t all join together like on a pyramid…so we had to look a bit closer at the other groups and noticed that there were shapes that had rectangular sides that connected to shapes like pentagons and hexagons, not just at one end but on two opposite sides. So our mystery shape finally found its group - the prisms. 

During language, in preparation for some of the research that we’ll be doing about our sensory organs we investigated the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts by comparing and contrasting some of the non-fiction books, and story books in our classroom library in order to identify the features of non-fiction texts.