Saturday, June 29, 2013

Good morning!  We cannot believe that July 1st is Monday.  June has flown by.  We hope you are enjoying your summer.

This week we began working on our latest TpT lesson plan.  We intended to write a plan to go with Twin Club, which is the first story in our second-grade Reading Streets basal, but since it is not a trade-book we changed our minds.  We decided to write a plan that goes with the very popular and well-loved story Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night by Cynthia Rylant.  We just started writing it on Wednesday of last week so it is not completed.  We have written one lesson plan so far, and it is a pre-reading and after-reading sequencing activity.  This lesson plan covers three of the second-grade Common Core State Standards.  Our plans will include activities that reinforce character analysis, retelling a story, and reading and writing beginning and ending consonant blends.  The Fourth of July holiday will slow us down a bit, so we look forward to having this lesson plan up soon after.

Kim had another fun and successful week of tutoring.  She and her student decided to make a podcast summarizing some of the chapters.  Her student has not completed his podcast, but you can listen to and view Kim's podcast at her school website.  Unfortunately, we cannot figure out how to embed a podcast directly into this blog.  Below is a screenshot of the blog.

Kim and her student also worked on answering thin and thick comprehension questions about chapters 12 and 13, as well as more vocabulary activities.  Below are some screenshots of the Smart Board activities she created for her student to use.

After reading and orally answering the question...

the student would move the pull tab to see how Kim answered the question.

Rivet is a fun activity created by Pat Cunningham.  We included this activity in our Tops and Bottoms plans.

Use the eraser to erase one letter at a time.  My student tried to decode the word  after each letter was revealed.

Similar to Hang Mouse, but the clue is the definition of the word.

Next week, Kim and her student will need to take a short break from reading Nerds so they can get the junior high summer reading assignment completed.  She will share the activities she is doing, but most of them will be reading and responding to the books by summarizing each chapter.  That is part of the requirement.

Kim's math student had a great time continuing to work on measurement, collecting data, finding the average and putting data into graph form.  They did the Aims STEM activity called It's the Last Straw.  This activity required the student to create an "airplane" out of paper loops and a straw.  Then, she had to conduct five trials  by throwing her airplane and measuring how far it flew.  The second part of the activity was to change one variable to try and make her plane fly farther.  She did it!!!! The student thought adding a pipe cleaner to the straw would give it a little more weight so the air currents wouldn't slow it down.  She also thought the wind going through the straw affected how far it flew, so putting a pipe cleaner into the straw would stop that.  This complete lesson took two tutoring sessions.

Part One

Part 2...pipe cleaner inside straw

Here are three planes that the student modified, but she chose to use the pipe cleaner one.

When we are not writing lesson plans, planning for tutoring, or completing our projects for our professional book read (we will share those ideas soon), we are on Twitter following educational experts and  websites.  Edutopia is a great site to follow.  Through Edutopia, Kim was connected to a great Pinterest board that showed ways to keep kids motivated to read...which is what our book read book focuses on.  Here is the link, Reading And Books.  One of our favorite ideas from this board is the Reading Fair.  We can't wait to have one next year.

Another thing we have been doing is read articles from the International Reading Association.  Our state is adopting the Common Core State Standards, and we want to keep abreast of information the IRA is putting out about them.  Kim found an excellent article by Leslie Mandel Morrow  explaing how to implement a few the common core standards through a thematic unit.  After reading the article, Kim felt like we have a great handle on implementing the CCSS.  Mandel Morrow's lesson ideas closely reflect the lesson we implement in our classroom, and the plans we are writing for TpT.

Have a Happy Fourth of July.  Keep enjoying your summer; it's flying by quickly.

Kim and Anne

Tuesday, June 25

As promised, we are linking to our TeachersPayTeachers store because we have finished our latest project.  We are excited that it is finally up.  Hopefully you will find it useful.

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Good Morning! This week we have busy working on our TpT lesson plan.  Like we said last week it is enormous so it took us all week to complete.  We still have to write the bibliography and proof read it, but it should be on our TeachersPayTeachers store on Monday.  As soon as we post it we will link you to it.  Below are pictures of what will be in our preview.  We hope you enjoy it, and we hope that it might be useful to you.  We sure had fun writing it and can't wait to use it with our own students.

Next week we plan to begin writing lesson plans to go with a second-grade Reading Streets story called The Twin Club.

This summer, we have been involved in a "book read" discussing the book Igniting A Passion For Reading by Steven L. Layne.  Everyone in our group has found this book to be informative and is excited to incorporate many of Layne's motivational reading ideas into our independent reading programs next year.  We will share some of the ways we plan to use his ideas in the coming weeks.

Kim had a lot of fun tutoring this week.  When working with the student she is tutoring in reading, Kim and her student continued reading the book Nerds by Michael Buckley.  The plot continues to get better and better as they get further into the book.  As stated last week, this book has fabulous vocabulary words, so she and her student played Hang Mouse on Spelling City so her student could become familiar with the pronunciations and spellings of the chosen words.  As the student spelled out each word, Kim would read the sentence from  Nerds that had the vocabulary word in it.  The student would then try to use the context clues to determine the meaning of the word.  He was very successful in figuring out most of the word meanings.  Before doing the two Smart Board activities Kim created using those same vocabulary words, her student played Read and Say on Spelling City.  In that game, the student is required to find the word and then the computer uses the word in a sentence.  It was another way for the student to practice using context clues to define the vocabulary words.  Below are screen shots of the Smart Board activities sheTagxedo used to reinforce the word meanings even further.

Creating a Tagxedo project was another fun activity Kim and her student did.  Tagxedo, if you're not familiar with it, is very much like Wordle. As they discussed the story and their thoughts about the characters and plot, the student typed key words into the program.  When he had a complete list of words and phrases he created what you see below.

Student's Tagxedo

Kim's sample Tagxedo

Kim has also been having fun working with her math student.  This week they worked on dividing, measuring, and finding the mean and median of a set of data.  She has been using lesson from Aims Education.  This site has wonderful math and science lessons, as well as informative blogs written by the mathematicians and scientists who contribute to Aims.

To help her student learn about division in a concrete manner, Kim used the Aims lesson Camp Fair Share.  In this lesson the student reads and acts out division story problems.   The "acting out" board is designed so the student has an easy transition into the symbolic representation of division problems.  See the pictures below for a better understanding.

Before dividing

After dividing

Taking division to a more abstract level

Since Thursday was such a beautiful warm and sunny day, Kim and her student decided to do a math activity that could be done outside.  It was called Ball Bounce.  This lesson can also be found at Aims Education.  In this lesson they had to drop a tennis ball from different heights and use the data to determine how different drop heights affected the bounce height.  They had to find the mean and median of their data and plot that data on a line graph.  They found out that the higher they dropped the ball the higher it bounced back up.  However, when they found the percentage of the bounce height to the drop height, the ball almost always bounced back up more than 50% of the drop height.  This was a fun way to review some of the math concepts they had learned in second grade and to introduce new, more challenging concepts the student will need in third grade.

Saturday, June 15, 2013

Happy Summer everyone!  We've been on summer break for about a week and a half now, but the weather sure hasn't seemed like summer.  It's been very chilly and rainy here in Illinois.  This is probably a good thing because we weren't tempted to put off our work to be outside "playing." :)

We have been working on our latest TpT lesson plans to go with the folktale, Tops and Bottoms adapted by Janet Stevens.

This lesson plan is turning out to be enormous, so we are not finished with it just yet, but I'm uploading some images of the cover sheet, the list of target goals, and the first lesson plan, so you can get an idea of what we are doing.

Listed are some of the 3rd grade Common Core State Standards(CCSS), but this plan covers 2nd grade CCSS, too.  Also listed are the target skills this bundle of lesson plans will cover.

This is the beginning page of the first lesson plan activities.

Kim has been tutoring two students this summer.  She began the day after school let out.  One student is working on reading and the other student is working on math enrichment activities.  Two computer activities the kids seemed to enjoy were Wixie and ShowMe, which is an iPad app.  

In reading, Kim and her student are reading the fantasy fiction book called Nerds by Michael Buckley.  She and her student are really intrigued by the plot.  They both created a Wixie card sharing their thoughts about the characters and the first few chapters of the book.

This program is fun because students can draw, import pictures, record their voices or other sounds, use templates the program provides, and much more.

We are also working on vocabulary development with this book.  It has exceptional vocabulary words, so she chose a few words she thought the student may not know such as ostracize, sarcophagus, preeminent, and flabbergasted.  We played Hang Mouse and Read-A-Word on Spelling City.  Then, we made a four-square vocabulary card with one of the words.

Box 1: vocabulary word; Box 2: definition from dictionary; Box 3: picture of word; Box 4: synonym

The four-square vocabulary strategy is very effective in helping students internalize new words and their meanings.  We will be doing more of these throughout the summer that she will share.  Sometimes the forth box will have the antonym of the word rather than the synonym.  

Another way to use Wixie is with math.  Kim's math student created a multiplication array card.

ShowMe is a free app that you can upload to your iPad.  It is an effective and engaging way to have your students demonstrate their understanding of a concept.  Below are two ShowMe projects.  Kim did one and her student did the other one.






We cannot wait to share more of our lesson plans and summer tutoring activities with you next week.  Until then...

Kim and Anne

Saturday, June 8, 2013

Well, Tuesday was our final day of school.  As we mentioned in our previous blog, we knew the last day would be bittersweet.  This year, both of our classes were amazing.  The students were happy, eager to learn, and seemed to love most of the activities we did.  It's always appreciated when seven and eight year olds enjoy the lessons we worked so hard to plan.  Our students pushed themselves to their limits and achieved goals we could not have dreamed for them.  Hopefully they are as proud of themselves as we are of them.  We truly believe our kids have become mature, serious students who are ready for new challenges.  We will miss them tremendously, but we know we will see their happy faces in the hallways waving to us as they scurry to their new classrooms in the fall.

Even though we only had a day and a half of school last week, we still planned fun, yet academic, activities.  Let us share a few that our students really loved.

On Monday we did a shared reading Wanda's Roses by Pat Brisson.  This story went along with our Natural Resources theme.  It's about a third-grade girl who finds what she thinks is a rose bush in a trash-ridden area.  She thinks the rose bush isn't blooming because it doesn't have enough sunlight, air, and water.  So she cleans up the trash thinking this will help.  When the rose bush still does not produce blooms, Wanda comes up with an idea to solve the problem.  In the process she receives many surprises.  Things turn out better than she could have ever hoped.

After reading and discussing the story, we found the turning point in the story to help us decide on the theme.  The kids came up with amazing ideas even on the last full day of school!!!!  Such ideas included:

When you have a problem get creative and solve it.

Staying calm and positive helps you solve problems.

Sometimes things work out better than you could have planned.

When you believe in your ideas you can make them come true.

This really is a book worth reading.

We then did a science experiment to show how two different types of trash, styrofoam and packing peanuts can affect our earth.  The question was, What will happen when a piece of styrofoam and a packing peanut are dropped into water?  What we discovered was the styrofoam stayed in the water and did nothing, but the packing peanut dissolved.  This is because the packing peanuts were made out of cornstarch.  We had a lengthy discussion of which product would be better to throw away in the trash and be better for our earth and the animals.  We discussed the idea of trying not to buy styrofoam products because they fill up our landfills and never go away.  We also discussed how some companies are becoming more responsible about the products they use making sure they are good for our environment.

Here is the video that inspired this science experiment. 

Then we used Magic Nuddle Building Blocks from Steve Spangle to create beautiful sculptures.  These nuddles are made out of cornstarch just like the packing peanuts we used in our experiment.  However, if you just add a little bit of water to the nuddles it acts like glue, and rather than melting them, it makes them stick together.  

Butterflies and a Flower

A Dinosaur

A Flower By A Lake

A Sword

A Bird On A Fence

Our final fun activity for the year was inspired by our favorite second-grade teacher, Amy Lemons.  We encourage you to check out her blog.  It is loaded with effective reading, writing, and math lessons.  

This lesson was called Measuring Olympics.  We did this activity during the final hour of the last day of school, and the kids were engaged the entire time.  The objective was to use meter sticks to measure the distances pom pons traveled.  We gave the kids a list of events such as flicking, dropping, blowing, tossing, spinning, and kicking to do with their pom pons.  We modeled each event and how to use the inch side of the meter sticks to measure the distances.  Below are pictures of the activity.

Thank you Amy Lemons for helping to make our final day of school fun and exciting for our students.

We hope you all had a wonderfully fulfilling final day of school.  Have a restful and relaxing summer.  Be sure to stop by our blog and checkout lessons we are creating for next year.  

Kim and Anne