Hello everyone!

As always, we’ve been doing lots of fun things here in Room 2.

One of our big focuses this week has been preparing students for conferences. We’ve been going through their work from these past few months and deciding which pieces of work they are proud of and which concepts they are still working on. It’s been an excellent opportunity to reflect on the year so far and see their progress! They’ve written down notes for what they want to talk about and they’ve been practicing the conference with me. They are all so excited to show you what we’ve been working on!

Besides preparing for conferences, we’ve continued working on our scripts for Ashes of Roses. Each group finished their second scenes this week and we are starting work on the final scenes of the play. We can’t wait to finally start rehearsing!

We also continued discussing pollution and climate change. This week we focused on oil spills. We simulated an ocean oil spill by having small bins filled with water and a little bit of glitter to represent fish. Then we poured in vegetable oil. The students were given a variety of materials (cotton balls, coffee filters, spoons, paper towels, and pipettes) to try and get the oil out of the water without “killing the fish.” The class had a blast experimenting with the different materials! In the end, the class decided that oil clean up was easier when they kept all the oil in one big clump, rather than breaking it up into lots of little clumps. They also discovered that using materials that were meant to soak up the oil ended up soaking up more water, not affecting the oil much at all. We also did some experimenting with the effects of dish soap on oil. When we poured it into our bins, we saw that it did a great job getting rid of the oil. However, it sent all of our glitter fish to the bottom of the bin. We did notice that the soap was great for cleaning off feathers that were covered in oil though!

After making their observations, we watched videos showing how ocean oil spills are actually cleaned up. We noticed that scientists have a lot of the same struggles that we had during our simulation. We saw that they used a very similar method to what we used in class- gather the oil together, then skim it off the top of the ocean. We discovered that they also sometimes use chemicals that have the same properties as dish soap to disperse the oil, but that it kills coral, which was similar to how the dish soap in our bins caused our glitter fish to die. We also saw how oil spills affect the environment years after the oil has been cleaned up. We discovered that there were some species that still haven’t recovered from the BP oil spill in 2010!  Finally, we saw how dish soap actually does have a place in oil spill clean up- washing off the wildlife. The class loved seeing footage of adorable baby ducks being cleaned off.

For Mindset Math this week, we learned about the Fibonacci sequence- a sequence of numbers where two previous numbers add up to make the next number (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…). The students had to put their problem solving skills to the test to try and figure out the pattern. Once they determined the pattern, the students applied to to see how it fit into the Fibonacci spiral- a  shape that represents the Fibonacci sequence that is often found in nature. Once they determined how the numbers fit the shape, they added to it. We’re ending up with some pretty big spirals!

In addition to all of this, we flexed our artistic muscles this week by decorating ornaments for the Des Plaines tree lighting ceremony on December 6th. We ended up with so many beautiful, unique designs. We especially loved using glitter; Room 2 is now a much more sparkly place.

Looking ahead: Next week will be the Usborne book fair on November 25-26. Tuesday will be an early release, and there will be no school Wednesday-Friday. I’m looking forward to seeing everyone at conferences!

Also, here is the link to the song that the class will be singing in Spanish for the Christmas performance. Please play it at home for them so they can practice!

Have an excellent weekend!