All About the Atmosphere

The past two weeks in room 105 has been full of learning about the atmosphere!  We have become true scientists, conducting investigations, experiments, and making observations about the world around us. We wanted to prove two things through our investigations:  That the atmosphere is made of air, and that there is water in the air.  Those are two very hard things to prove, because air cannot be seen, and water vapor is also invisible.

We conducted experiments with water bottles, balloons, straws, and even a humidifier to try to prove to ourselves that air is in the atmosphere, and water is in the air.

Below are some pictures from our last experiment involving evaporation:  We made a puddle on the ground, and watched as the water disappeared in front of our eyes!  We remembered the word evaporation, and used it to explain what was happening in our experiment.

We traced our puddles in chalk to help us better see if any changes occurred to it over time.

What do you think we noticed about our puddles?

Next week, we will apply our understanding of the atmosphere and how water changes states when we learn about the water cycle.  Having this background knowledge form our experiments will really enhance our understanding of the atmosphere.  All of this learning fits into our unit on weather!

Wonderful Weather

We are learning all about weather in science!  We began our weather study this week by activating our prior knowledge about weather in a quickwrite.  We shared our ideas and were able to gain an understanding of what we already know about weather.

Next, we explored some wonderful fiction books about weather.  Often, fictional stories are great places to begin our learning, as they often include facts!  We read A Boat Ride with Lillian Two Blossom, a story by Patricia Polacco, and discussed both weather myths and weather misconceptions.

Our Big Idea for weather in second grade is: The sun, air, and water work together to create our weather.  This will be along unit which will culminate in a project focusing on conserving water and other resources, including a look at bottled water (you may know, one of my "favorite" topics!)

I am so impressed by what we already know about weather, and can't wait to see how much this class learns in the next few weeks!