CSI, The Brain, Critical Thinking, and Habits of Mind

    Today second graders had a crash course in our theme for the semester: Crime Scene Investigation!  We played the roles of handwriting analysts, forensic sketch artists, and looked closely for evidence on a ransom note left behind in our classroom!  For more crime fighting, your student can further explore these links to CSI activities and games.    

Forensics

Art of Crime Detection

Perp Walk

Face Memory

A perfect match by our sketch artist!

     We also looked at critical thinking and different types of thinkers. Ask you child about Naive Nancy, Selfish Sam, and Fair-minded Fran. Students should recognize quality thinking as accurate, fair, clear, relevant, and logical. Carrying on with the same theme, students learned about the connections they make in their brain when they learn and how to strengthen these pathways. This year we want to be very intentional about building a growth mindset in students. It will be our goal to emphasize the part of effort and perseverance in learning and intelligence as something that can be grown or grow stagnant. To evaluate our current perspective on intelligence, we took the mindset quiz at this link. Feel free to take it yourself! We want to turn "I can't do it!" into "I can't do it yet!"  

Showing how connections are made and strengthened in the brain!

     We also continued to look at the Habits of Mind and students played a matching game to become more familiar with them, did some brain stretching analogies, and enjoyed a friendly round of The Set Game!  Next week we will be a combined class and welcome our third graders to their new day of instruction.