Let's Leap for learning!

First Grade

    Our first graders are getting ready for “History Day” on March 4.  We read about the life of George Washington as a young boy in the 1700’s.  We compared his life then, to our life now.  This coming week we will learn more about life long ago in preparation for History Day on Friday.  Students will rotate with the other first grades through a variety of stations to discover more about daily life in the past.   
​    In our math lessons students organized and interpreted data on a number of topics.   After creating a graph about the data they had to answer and ask questions about the data.  We also learned to record the data on a Google Sheet and create pie charts, bar graphs, and other ways of displaying the information.   
      We completed our unit on Astronomy this week.  Students learned about the moon and about the American Astronauts that visited the moon.  We read about the space race in the 1960s and our determination to reach the moon by the end of the decade.  Students heard that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were the first two people to walk on the moon and that the United States won the space race.  A
    We discussed that humans have only traveled as far as the moon.  Exploration of planets and places beyond has been limited to unmanned space craft.      We studied the planets in our Solar System and learned about  the inner planets and outer planets.  Ask your child to explain the what makes the planets inner or outer.  We created informational posters about each planet and the sun. Also, we discussed what the planets have in common and what makes each one unique.

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Second Grade

                                                     This week we began a unit on the U.S. Civil War.  We heard about  Harriet Tubman,  who was born an Enslaved African.  We learned that Enslaved Africans were forced to work without pay. They worked on plantations, and they had no freedom to choose their work or where they lived.  
   We read about Harriet Tubman's young life and how her family  was split up by the plantation owner.  We learned Harriet Tubman hoped to make a change in her life and finally did when she escaped to freedom in the North. Once she was in the North, however, she returned to the south many times as  a conductor on the Underground Railroad.      Students learned that Enslaved Africans used the Underground Railroad to escape the harsh conditions in the South.  We discovered the Underground Railroad was not an actual train, but a secret route that the slaves used to get away.  The slaves were called passengers, but they did not sit and ride on a train.  Underground Railroad passengers traveled on foot during the night and hid during the day to avoid being caught and returned to their life of slavery.  
     Students learned the passengers used the north star to guide them.  We learned that the song "Follow the Drinking Gourd" was a secret code that the slaves used to find their way North and to Freedom.  Ask your child how the slaves used the "Drinking Gourd" to find their way North.
     Grade two  students have been adding and subtracting amounts of money during math.  We began by reviewing values of coins using “school money.”  Students applied their understanding of place value strategies and skip-counting to find the total value of a group of bills and coins.  They learned to properly label their money using the dollar and cent signs.  And, the proper use of the decimal point when writing amounts of money.    Also, we worked on ways to use different combinations of coins to make the same total value. 
    Grade two has a field trip on March 31.  We are going to the Youth Science Institute at Vasona Park.  We will be learning about animal life in a pond and insects.  We have limited space so we will only be taking a couple of parents on the field trip.

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