2nd Grade Rounding with Habitats
Second graders at Holladay Elementary are learning how to round to the nearest ten in math (SOL2.1b) and they are studying habitats in science (SOL2.5), so today students in Ms. Edmonds’ class created comics about rounding numbers in habitats. First, I posted a link to StoryboardThat on Google classroom. StoryboardThat is an amazing webtool that students can use to create their own comics. I introduced the lesson by explaining that scientists often count living and nonliving things in a habitat, but since they can’t count every single one, they usually round the numbers. I instructed the students to choose a habitat they were curious about (desert, forest, ocean, etc) and think about the living and nonliving things in that habitat. They could do some quick research online if necessary. When the students had their ideas, they clicked the Storyboard link and were given a blank comic strip with three boxes. I explained that they would put living things (plants and animals) from the habitat in two boxes and nonliving things (rocks, shells, etc) in the other box. They dragged in backgrounds, characters, and clip art into each scene. They enjoyed changing the facial expressions and poses of the characters. Then we added speech bubbles for the characters to say how many of each living and nonliving thing there were in the habitat. We took a screenshot of our comics and posted them to Google classroom with a question about rounding the animals, plants, or nonliving things in the habitat. Our classmates tried rounding the numbers in our comics to the nearest ten, and they posted their answers in the comments. You can try them yourself here.