Keep on swimming! Keep on swimming!

Happy Wednesday friends!! Lindsey here:) Last week I popped on to tell you a little bit about our ocean unit, which you can read about here. Well...the unit continues. I don't mind because the kiddos LOVE learning about the ocean and the independence that is built into this unit allows them to focus as the creeping summer bug inches closer...

This week we have really been focusing on our research reports. Each student gets to pick their own animal, in advance of the unit, and then sets to work researching. I make sure that they pick their animal so that I have time to gather books for their research.

This project takes a TON of books and with 7 second grade teachers doing this same project you can bet their isn't an ocean book available in this whole county!!!

Now...you know how you tell those sweet kiddos things...and you explain it...and you do it as a class...and then you repeat it just one more time...five minutes later...what do I do again???? Yeah. Insert hair pulling out frustration. Well...this time I smartened up!!

Each kiddo has a booklet with each of these topics. They need to research them and write facts. Guess what???? Now when they tell me "I can't remember what this means..." I can just say "go look at the poster!" Ta-da! Then they go and read the guiding questions and they are good to go!!

Most of my kiddos are knee-deep in research right now...

Since this project allows the students to work at their own pace, as the students finish they can start working on their research paper. Right now I've got about 4 kiddos ready to work on their paper.

This kiddo is on his draft. The draft tells them exactly what to write about and how many sentences are expected. This project is writing heavy for my second graders but because it is broken down they seem to handle it well.

While this project seems to consume most of our time, we are also learning about oceans in other areas. This week in reading groups we worked with two different passages. One focused on the food chain, which connected well to the diet portion of our research projects. The other passage focuses on tide pools which connects well to the hermit crab poems we are working on.

You can find both of these passages in our Under the Sea Passage Set.

We are also learning about the oceans in our poetry unit, which we just started. I will pop on soon to share that with you all. I hope you are all having a wonderful week!

Keep on swimming! Keep on swimming! Summer is almost here!