A Winter Day with the 2nd/3rd Grade Adventurers

It was so good to be back at the farm on Monday and Tuesday! We revisited Pine Needle Village, and the children settled right into play scenarios that had them fully engaging in the space and with each other. Their shelter building in the woods explored how to build a lean-to using two tall pieces of wood leaned against a support beam, to which many other long branches were stacked and laid horizontally to form the wall. The mud on Tuesday provided the perfect medium for filling in cracks between those branches. Friends stepped around to the shelter side and proclaimed, “That mud really helps! It feels so much warmer over here!”

Seeking active ways to do our learning, four hammocks were hung so the children could swing while reading or listening to and discussing our read aloud, Who Is Martin Luther King, Jr.?. Math involved some data collection this week in the form of pom pom slingshots. The students divided into two groups, shot their pom poms several times, counted their steps to where each landed, and recorded the data. They then had to add to find their total and divide by their attempts to find their average. We used this data to explore mean, median, and mode. When we repeated the slingshots the second day, I heard things like, “C’mon! My mode is eight again?! I got that yesterday.” “My modes are 10 and 7.” “Hey, I have two modes, too!” The students settled right into the rhythm of shoot the pom pom, record the result, and repeat. It was wonderful to see them so engaged and hear them independently demonstrate their understanding of the concepts.