🔬 2nd grade Science: how to help at home

What each unit covers

1. 🧊Solids & Liquids

   Sorting solids and liquids, describing melting, freezing and boiling, and changes that can or can't be undone.

2. ✂️Changing Materials

   Ways to change materials: cutting, bending, mixing, warming and cooling keep the same material, while cooking, burning and rusting make something new.

3. 🦋Animal Life Cycles

   Life cycles of butterflies, frogs, chickens and mammals, and how some animals change a lot while others look like small adults.

4. 🛷Push & Pull

   Pushes and pulls, magnets, gravity, and how surfaces slow things down.

5. 🧪Mixtures & Materials

   Mixing liquids and solids (dissolving, separating), what sinks or floats, and which materials soak up or push away water.

6. 🔧Build, Test & Rebuild

   Practices engineering steps: asking questions to define a problem, sketching how a shape helps an object work, comparing two designs from test data, and seeing how an object made of small pieces can be taken apart and built into something new.

7. 🔊Light and Sound

   Sound is made by vibrations and can bounce, travel and be absorbed. Light comes from sources such as the Sun, fire and electricity, travels in straight lines and bounces off surfaces. Children also learn to protect their eyes and ears.

8. 🔦Signals Far Away

   Practices how light and sound can carry a message over a distance, from flashlights and whistles to drums and signal flags, and how to design a simple signal.

9. 🐝Plants, Seeds & Pollinators

   Practices testing what plants need to grow, and how animals carry pollen and spread seeds.

10. 🦉Animal Adaptations

    Body features (fur, quills, beaks, camouflage) and behaviors (hibernating, migrating, storing food) that help animals survive, and which features change as animals grow.

11. ♻️Care for Our Earth

    Show how your family reuses and recycles. Spend time outside, and talk about taking only what you need and leaving nature as you found it.

12. 🦅Producers & Consumers

    Practices making food chains that start with a producer (a plant that makes its own food) and continue with consumers (animals that eat plants or other animals), and how animals depend on other living things for food.

13. 🌪️Wind, Water & Wild Weather

    Practices how wind and water move soil and rock (sand dunes, washed-out hills), fast and slow changes to the land, and severe weather such as hurricanes, tornadoes and floods, including which are more likely in different parts of Texas.

14. 🌡️Sun, Moon & Weather Records

    Practices that the Sun is a star giving light and heat, that the Moon shines with reflected sunlight, how telescopes and binoculars show more of the sky, and measuring and graphing temperature and rainfall.