Camp Pitch Our Tents

I didn't do many blogs about school and things we were doing there. I'm going to try to do a little more of that in future. This year I was too busy just trying to make it through the year. Hopefully there will be more successes next year that I will WANT to blog about. The kids have been done with school for 10 days, the teachers for 4. I think I'm ready to talk about it now. Or at least the last couple weeks of it.

As a whole grade we decided to go to camp for the last two weeks of school. Many of the teachers did it last year and wanted to do it again. It was a Teachers Pay Teachers thing that one of the teachers had found. (side note: Teacher's Pay Teachers is the best website ever! https://www.teacherspayteachers.com)  It's basically a fun way to review the things we learned this year with a fun camp theme. We still did work and learning was still happening, so it wasn't just a free for all at the end.

We sent a note to parents and had the students bring in some money. We bought shirts for all the students and a WHOLE BUNCH of supplies for the different snacks and science experiments we did. Each class had a different color shirt, which made it nice at recess because I could tell which class students were from.

They had a camp notebook that had all of the worksheets and stuff. They put on a play from the camp notebook. Some students were the actors and some were stage crew. They actually performed the play for a 4th grade class. We wrote letters to next year's teacher, to next year's 2nd graders, made a commercial for a book they recommend for next year's 2nd graders, various math games, making paper airplanes, blowing bubbles on their desk, making quick sand with corn starch (HUGE disaster- almost quit camp after that one. It was terrible), s'mores in solar ovens, making clay canoes, making a lava lamp, and various camp snacks. They were allowed to bring in a small tent from home, blankets and pillows. They could use them when we had reading time.

Overall camp was a lot of fun and a great way to end the school year. We had a great time and many of my students said camp was the best thing about 2nd grade. :)

*there's a formatting problem and it won't let me move this movie to where I would like it to be. This is just a video of the lava lamps we made.

My class t-shirt

the whole 2nd grade- it's insane how big this school is

After the quick sand catastrophe I made the class earn back the privilege to attend camp. We spent 1.5 hours reflecting on what went wrong and how we would do it better. They came up with these camp rules from that reflection.  

Practicing for the play. They made the campfire in art class. 

Will it float? Making a canoe out of clay and how many squares can it hold- if it floats at all. 

Solar oven s'mores. They made predictions on how long it would take to melt and monitored the progress. 

I have since learned that we should have had black paper on the bottom and covered it with plastic wrap to help the marshmallows melt. The chocolate melted just fine. After this I was "the best teacher ever"

Fishing mix- fishes, fishing rods, and nets. 

This was bug juice. We use apple juice and gummy worms. As I gave it to the class I felt a little weird about it but about died laughing (inside, not out where the kids could see) when I heard one of the students tell the other students to drink the juice and then eat the worm. Really- it's bug juice!!!

This is dirt pudding that me made, and you can see the one tent I had in my class.