Project Based Learning in 2nd Grade!!

Second graders engaged in a project-based learning unit called Socktober.  Throughout the month of October, they considered the essential question, "How can we help local children in need?"  Students learned about needs and wants, and discovered that some families do not have the means to provide basic necessities for their children.

The students hosted a sock drive to collect new, clean children’s socks to be donated to The Community Giving Tree, a local organization that gathers and distributes children's clothing, diapers, and other necessities to families on the North Shore.  The children created flyers and letters to inform their families about the sock drive and to persuade them to donate.  Students used skip counting and a variety of mental addition and subtraction strategies to determine the total socks collected.  They created bar graphs and pictographs to represent the data for socks collected.

In all, the students collected 620 pairs of new children's socks.  Last week, a representative from The Community Giving Tree visited visit to teach students about the mission of the organization. She described how volunteers gather donations and distribute them to people who need them. The students asked thoughtful questions about the process. She was very impressed with how many socks our second graders collected.