I have been so excited to share with you guys all of the fun things we have been up to in 2nd grade over the last 8 weeks! The 2nd grade team decided to do an 8 week unit on geography around the world and the animals found within each continent. We incorporated this into our reading, writing and science/social studies blocks! My cooperating teacher and I spent countless hours transforming the entire classroom to look like the globe. The look on the kids faces when they walked in the next day to see what had changed made it all worth it! Let’s get started on our trip around the world 🙂
We started off in North America (we had to make sure we knew where we lived) haha! During this week, we learned about all the different national parks found within our country and what animals are found there! Each student got to pick their favorite animal they learned about in North America and recreate it with construction paper!
Next, we jumped south to South America! We focused on learning about the Amazon Rainforest and the different layers of the rainforest. For this week, the students got to choose two animals they found the most interesting in the Amazon Rainforest and write a paper comparing and contrasting the two. Let me tell ya, I feel like I am an expert on jaguars now, haha! They also each created their own Amazon Rainforest and what kinds of animals are found in each layer.
The following week we headed to Asia! If you know me, then you know how obsessed I am with pandas! I definitely felt like I was glowing during this week educating my friends all about giant pandas and red pandas! For our writing piece, we were learning about opinion writing so each student had to choose whether they liked the giant panda or red panda more. This giant panda craft was one of my favorites, super easy and came out so stinking cute. We also spent half of our week learning all about the tigers found in Asia. What a perfect week for me right? Tigers and pandas, my favorite!
Sadly, we did not touch on Europe because well there isn’t much wildlife to talk about… so we’ll catch ya next time Europe!
We made these safari hats for the kids to wear throughout the weeks with their own binoculars as well! They had so much fun pretending they were on their own safari checking out the animals all over the world!
Now onto my FAVORITE continent we did, Africa! We actually spent two weeks on Africa because there is so many amazing animals found there we couldn’t fit it all in one week. The first week was actually my unit plan that I taught on the book “Library Lion”. We did these adorable lion crafts and the students had a writing assignment that went along with it! We also worked on comparative adjectives this week which are what the bananas and binoculars are. The bananas were used to compare two animals that we have learned about so far. During our second week on Africa, we focused on Jane Goodall and elephants! Jane Goodall is known for her studies on chimpanzees, so in our binocular craft, the students compared an animal found in Africa to a chimpanzee by drawing pictures in the eye holes and completing the sentence. The second half of our week we compared African Elephants to Asian Elephants. These elephant crafts are a top favorite of mine as well! The monkey crafts were just a morning activity for them to work on as they finished breakfast!
Now we’re heading to the land down under, Australia! Okay, this is another favorite… but how can you not love Australia?? We really focused on kangaroos this week and learning about life cycles. The students had to fill out a life cycle sheet on a kangaroo and then made these adorable kangaroo crafts! The life cycle is rolled up into the joey craft, genius right?! We also talked about koalas because how could you not? These koala paintings actually turned out so cute with their little hands!
Last but not least, Antartica! Most of you probably know what exciting event happened this week, our Penguin Palooza 🙂 We spent our week learning all about the 17 different types of penguins! I know, who knew there were 17 types?? Each student became the expert on their type of penguin and did all the research on it. On Friday was our Palooza where everyone got to dress up like their penguin and present about it. This was the day before spring break so you can only imagine how hectic it was… still super fun though!
We are currently learning about Oceans this week and next, specifically sharks and dolphins! Stay tuned for some stories on our instagram @delightfullydorn for some awesome crafts we work on 😉
Can you tell we love crafts? Haha! This content has been a BLAST to teach and the kiddos have loved every second of it! With the year these kiddos were given with all of the COVID restrictions, they deserved to have this much fun while they’re learning! I cannot wait to add fun activities and crafts to my own classroom one day!!