Update on our PBL

As I shared before, our class has begun our very first adventure with Project Based Learning this year.  I was out two days this week, attending a workshop, but we still moved forward in our learning.  

Since our last post about our PBL project, we had two visitors come to our class to share their knowledge with us.  

First, Mr. Froese, the director of Educational Technology for our district, came to speak with us about digital learning.  We had lots of questions for him and he had even more for us.  He really helped the kids dig deep in regard to what direction they wanted to move with their projects.  He also gave us ideas for how to frame key words for our online research.  

One of the words on our rubric was creative.  As the kids discussed the rubric, they wondered how they would know if their project were creative.  Mia remembered a lesson Mrs. Windham, our GT teacher had done over creativity so we invited her to come visit us again for a brief review.  She brought FEFO with her and gave us some wonderful information.  She even left a poster she had made to explain what FEFO stood for (Fluency, Elaboration, Flexibility, Originality.)  We will definitely use this as we begin to consider products to share our learning.  

One of our "Needs to Know" questions was How do we know if a website is safe or not?  As a class we are exploring this question (more to come on this in a future blog post.)  Each team of students decided to select one of the tools we use as digital learners and create a product to share with other second graders so they will know how to use these tools safely and responsibly.  Below are our teams.

More to come soon!

Pic Penguins--PicCollage

Twitter Tigers--Twitter

 Bird Bloggers--Kid Blog

FASTTMath Fasties--FASTTMath

Smart Hawks--SmartBoard

Perfect Pals: Puppet Pals

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A Week of "Firsts"

This was a week of "firsts" for our 2nd grade class.  The first first was that we Skyped for the first time with our learning friends in Mrs. Goodwin's 2nd grade class in Indiana.  Mrs. Goodwin's class is one of friends in the Primary Blogging Community.  During our Skype session, Mrs. Goodwin's class shared a Halloween poem and then three students shared poems they had written.  

Nadia introduced our class and shared some information about us.  Our class has been working on the reading strategy of visualization and so we also read a  Halloween poem to Mrs. Goodwin's class.  Jordan and Morgan then shared their pictures they had drawn based on what they visualized as they read the poem.  It was exciting to get to see some of the students we have been learning with.  

Our next first was that we linked our Kidblog account with our some learning friends in Canada.  Mrs. Roddau's 2nd grade class loves to blog just like us. Now that our classes are linked, students can comment on one another's blogs. It was really neat to see what students in Canada write about.   

Learning to collaborate safely and responsibly with other students throughout the world is a major professional goal of mine this year.  One of the most exciting things about technology is that we are able to tear down the walls of our classroom and learn alongside other students in meaningful ways.  

Can't wait to see what other "firsts" this year brings.  What new things is your class trying for the first time?  We would love to hear from you!

The Boat Challenge

We received the following challenge:

Create a boat that can float while carrying 10 penny passengers using only the materials provided.  You have 30 minutes to explore and test the materials before you begin your design.  Good luck and happy learning!

To say the students were excited would have been a complete understatement.  Students selected partners and the learning began.  The challenge which took three science periods to complete was designed to enable students to explore the following Texas state standard 

2.5(D) Combine materials that when put together can do things that they cannot do by themselves.

Talk about engagement!

ENGAGEMENT (as defined by Phil Schlechty.)
• The student sees the activity as personally meaningful. 
• The student’s level of interest is sufficiently high that he persists in the face of difficulty. 
• The student finds the task sufficiently challenging that she believes she will accomplish something of worth by doing it. 
• The student’s emphasis is on optimum performance and on “getting it right.” 

Watch the following video which chronicles our learning.

Learning to Comment on Blogs

I recently wrote about our entry into the world of blogging. Students typed their first blog post on a Friday and before the weekend was over, they had received over 100 comments.  Our next lesson was how to reply to comments. We discussed why we would want to reply and how to write a reply.  

After seeing how many comments they had received, students wanted to comment on each others posts as well.  I turned to a great student created video from some of our learning friends in California.  Ms. Yollis' class has created a wonderful video explaining how to write quality comments on blogs. If you are wanting to support your students in writing effective comments, the Second Grade Superstars gives this video Two Thumbs Up! 

Here are some comment we wrote after watching this video.

Blog post:

Student comment:

Blog post:

 Student Comment:

Blog Post:

 Student Comment:

Launching Our First PBL

Our campus is participating in a common-threaded PBL.  During a recent campus professional learning teachers were challenged to design a project based learning experience around the theme of digital citizenship.  Our team reviewed our technology TEKS and decided to focus on the following TEKS:

5B Comply with acceptable digital safety rules, fair use guidelines, and copyright laws.

3B Use search strategies to access information to guide inquiry

Our driving question is:

How can we, as digital learners, teach other second graders to use technology in a safe and responsible way?

We launched our learning today with an entry event created by some of our district Strategic Design Coaches.  (Thank you Su and Stacey!)

The students were excited to begin their project.  I will continue to blog about our journey.

Student Blogs

This week, we launched our individual student blogs.  In the weeks leading up to our launch, we learned what blogs are from our friends Tim and Moby at Brain Pop.  We read sample student blogs from our learning friends on Twitter.  We also discussed some safety rules and blogging etiquette to ensure that we are being safe and responsible with our posts.  Parents were also informed about our blogging endeavors and had the option to opt out.  

We are using Kidblog to host our student blogs.  I chose them because they offer a free hosting option.  Most importantly though, they have the added security option that enables me to preview and approve each student post and every comment made before it goes live.  

To help facilitate our first blog post, I asked students to write about the top three things their readers would want to know about them.   The students were very excited about having blogs after all their learning.  

I emailed parents the link and invited them to share it with their extended families.  Additionally I mentioned we were launching to our principal.  I was not prepared for what happened next.  Within 24 hours, the comments were pouring in--64 and counting.  Cousins, aunts, uncles, sisters, mothers, and fathers were commenting.  My principal even spent her Friday night commenting on every student blog post.  Wow!

Kidblog will become one of the choices in our Working on Writing station.  I know it will be a popular choice and with only three laptops in my room, we will have to work out how we might take turns.  I am excited to see how our blogging year goes.  

Nonfiction and Fiction

This image comes from this site.  

We have been learning about the features of fiction and nonfiction.  Our focus this week was on how to determine if a book is fiction or nonfiction and why it is important to know the difference.

Over the past several weeks, we read numerous books.  We discussed the authors purpose and message.  We also learned about the features of fiction and nonfiction. We created a class double bubble map to compare and contrast these two types of text.  We also went to the library and selected two different books.  One had to be fiction and the other had to be nonfiction. Each student was asked to then provide evidence that their book was fiction or nonfiction and to create a product in Educreations to show their learning.  Below is an example of one of our projects. Tomorrow we will be uploading our projects to our individual blogs and writing about why it is important to be able to tell if a book is fiction or nonfiction.

Primary Blogging Community Friends

Our class is participating in the Primary Blogging Community.  During the first round, learning friends from the United States and Canada will be visiting our classroom blog to learn more about us.  Below is some information we wanted to share with our new friends.

Dear Learning Friends,


We are second grade students who learn together in Carrollton, TX.  

Our school is Polser Elementary which is in the Lewisville Independent School District.  

We created a Google Map and put a pin to show where we are located.  Click on the link, zoom out, and add your pin to our map so we can see where you are.  


Here is a link to a video that shows what learning looks like in our classroom.

Here are some of our favorite blog posts that show some of our learning:

Features of Nonfiction

Citizen Heroes

What Happened to the Ice?

What Happened to the Ice? Continued

We are looking forward to learning with you!

Your learning friends, 

2nd Grade Superstars

Project Based Learning

We are getting ready to launch our first Project Based Learning (PBL) experience in two weeks.  I am not going to share exactly what our PBL will be about until we launch it as a class, but in the meantime, below is some information about Project Based Learning if you would like to learn more.

Watch this video

Read this article

8 Essential Elements  for Project-Based Learning

What Happened to the Ice...Continued

We are continuing to investigate the question Olivia presented to us yesterday. We launched our inquiry with a science talk to share our thinking from yesterday.  

To help us with our discussion we used our accountable talk stems and structured our discussion using the Harkness Discussion framework.  Since this was our first Harkness discussion, Mrs. Haney tracked our data using her document camera so we could see how the discussion was moving.  We are learning to share talk time and ensure that everyone has the opportunity to share.  

During a discussion we came up with a vocabulary word to describe what we were observing happen to the ice--melting.  A turning point in the discussion came when several students used the accountable talk stem "This reminds me of..."  Jordan remembered a science lab he had done in Kindergarten and SrRyan shared previous learning about body heat.  This helped us design two investigations we could do in class.  

Half of us investigated what would happen if we put an icepack in a place where it would not be exposed to any sunlight.  They decided the best place would be a locker, and placed the icepack in the locker for 20 minutes.  After 20 minutes, they took the icepack out the locker and discovered the ice had not melted much at all.  

The other half of us investigated what would happen if we held an icepack next to a human body.  Andrew decided to take one for our learning team and hold the icepack next to his leg.  He was wearing jeans and he thought he could do it.  (He later said it was an easy task.)  After 20 minutes, he took the icepack off of his leg and we were surprised to see how much it had melted.  (Mrs. Haney is kicking herself for forgetting to take pictures of the icepack.)

Andrew takes one for the team and holds an icepack on his leg.  

We kept checking in with him to see if he wanted one of us to 

take over.  He only let Mrs. Haney take over for a couple of minutes

while he stepped out of the room.  :)

After we were done we realized we had even more questions and planned some future investigations.  We will be synthesizing our learning with another science talk on Friday.  We will keep you posted!  In the meantime, we would love your comments, suggestions, or questions about our learning. Leave us a comment below.  

Analyzing our data from our Harkness Discussion.

What Happened to the Ice?

Today, one of our classmates had a slight mishap on the playground.  She went to the nurse and got an icepack.  After 20 minutes we noticed that the ice had changed.  Since we are starting a unit on changes in matter, Mrs. Haney had Olivia share with the class what happened and presented the following question to the class.  What happened to the ice? Students were asked to respond by telling what happened and why they think it happened.  Below is a link to our responses.  We will be learning more about changes in matter over the next couple of week.  It will be interesting to see how our understandings develop.  

Check out our thoughts here

Thanks for taking one for the team Olivia and helping with our learning today! 

 :)