Activities and Ideas You Can Implement Immediately

Saturday, November 30, 2013

Good Morning! We hope everyone had a wonderfully relaxing holiday with family and friends.  We sure did.  It was a well needed break, and now we are reenergized for December.  Since our students were not in class last week we don't have lessons and student work to share with you, but we do have some articles, activities, and websites you can visit.  Each one has activities and ideas you can implement into your classroom immediately if you so desire.  Some of these resources have been shared with us and some Kim found over the holiday break.

The first two resources help students solidify their understanding of nouns.  The interactive website exposes students to a plethora of information, and the possessive noun activity is what we are using as our morning warm-up Monday.

Naming Nouns Interactive Website

Free Possessive Noun Activity

The next article is from Aims Education and we will be using the ideas in it as soon as we introduce double digit subtraction.  We love all things Aims.  Every single one of the activities that we have used has really helped our students begin to internalize concepts in both math and science.  Be sure to go to the activity links because those are the lessons that you can use in math.

Making Double Digit Subtraction Memorable

The last two resources have to do with the Common Core State Standards.  The article is a very simple explanation of what the Common Core entails.  It may be a good resource for parents.  They may begin to understand why the expectations of their children are higher than ever before.  The CCSS website is an excellent resource that our tech coach shared with our staff.  It has myriad educational videos and games for students to engage in.  Kim found one resource on the compare and contrast skill that she is going to use as a Daily 5 assignment.  The students must listen to two stories and compare and contrast them.  It seems highly engaging...she will let you know if it was after she tries the assignment with her students.

New Common Core...

World's Largest CCSS Educational Resource Catalog

We hope these resources are useful and inspiring.  Have a great weekend and an even better Monday!

Kim and Anne

Wrapping It Up

Friday, November 22, 2013

Hi Everyone,
Right now we are blogging in the middle of our "game" time.  Our second graders won the school-wide box-top contest and "game" time was their prize.  Let us tell you, it's not easy to concentrate amid the excitement, but at least the kids are engaged on this day before Thanksgiving break.

This week we tried to wrap up all of our reading, writing, and social studies projects.  We are just going to share the highlights with you because we have a bizillion things to do to get ready for Parent-Teacher conferences which are next week.  We're sure you know how it is. :)

Our final activity to go with The Bremen Town Musicians was to find the theme of the story.  The students went back to the story for a third time to do some close reading to find the most important events that occurred.  We listed those events and then posed these questions to the students:  What did the characters learn about themselves?  How did they change?  Could we learn anything from their actions?  Thinking about and discussing these questions helped us discover the theme, or should I say themes.  Our students did a great job identifying many of them.

We revisited our scarecrow poems during shared reading.  We worked on comparing and contrasting two different poems and using the visualization strategy to help us make those comparisons and contrasts.

In social studies we finished our first three pages of our Me On The Map books.  So far we have learned the names of the seven continents and the continent we live on.  We found two great websites that with interesting information about North America.  The kids loved reading them so much we had to give them extra time, so we didn't get to our United States page.

Now we are off to a Friday social.  It is much needed after this crazy week of report cards.  Have a great Thanksgiving.

Kim and Anne

Reading, Writing, and Math

Friday, November 15, 2013

We missed everyone last week.  We were so extremely busy with things in our personal lives we had no choice but to skip writing our blog.  We don't like to miss a week of writing, but sometimes life just gets in the way.  It feels great to be back on our regular blogging schedule, and we have a few fun activities to share with you.

After reading aloud The Wild Things by Maurice Sendak, the students wrote a narrative piece about a time they were wild.  It did not matter if they wrote about being wild with rage or wild with excitement.  Boy, did we hear some stories!!!    The best one was a kid who wanted candy so badly on Halloween that he stole 10 Kit Kats from an outside bowl when he was only supposed to take one.  We laughed so hard because they are so honest.  This writing lesson was adapted from Amy Lemons.  She has a great website if you want to check it out.  She also has wonderful lessons on TeachersPayTeachers.

For the past four weeks we have been reading nonfiction texts, in guided reading,  to help us become aware of some of the features of this genre, as well as descriptive text structure.  To reinforce various text features found in informational texts, we listened to a text features song we found on Kristina Smekens' website.  The kids loved it and could not stop singing it.  Our culminating activity was having each guided reading group create an informational text page using information they learned in their guided reading books. These pages included various features of nonfiction texts.  This activity also reinforced the concept of main idea and details.

This was a great lead in to discussing other text structures such as compare and contrast, description, and chronological order.  We found a great resource at Kristina Smekens' workshop filled with texts written with different text structures.  These texts are short and can be read and discussed within one guided reading session.

Last summer AimsEducation sent out a free math lesson called  Raisin Boxes and we have been anxious to use it with our kids ever since.  It is a great lesson on collecting data, creating a line plot, analyzing data and finding the median, mode and range of the data.  Our students really enjoyed it, and we think they are beginning to understand how to use data to understand information.  For instance, we learned that Sun Maid raisins had more raisins in their boxes than the generic brand.  When asked which brand of raisins they would buy, some responded "Sun Maid, because there's more raisins," but others said, "The generic brand because I can't stand raisins and wouldn't want to eat that many."  They are so funny and always surprising us.  We just assumed all the kids would say they would buy the brand with more raisins, never thinking if you don't like raisins you don't want that many.

Enjoy the weekend and we will talk to you next week on the blog.

Kim and Anne

Fall Reading and Writing Activities

Saturday, November 2, 2013

We had a fabulous week filled with reading and writing activities. We will just give you the highlights  because sometimes we think we're too wordy.

When we think about a few of our favorite things, word block is not one of them.  We are not big phonics people.  However, this week we did have some fun with phonics and vocabulary, but we always have fun with vocabulary.

To solidify the bossy r syllable type, the students went on a scavenger hunt around the room to find words with the bossy r.  They made their own charts, shared them with the class, and now whenever they spot a bossy r word they can add it to the chart.

We used scarecrow poems to enrich our students' vocabulary.  Often with vocabulary we differentiate the kids into two groups.  With these poems one group focused solely on the word tattered.  The other group had many amazing words in their poem to choose from.  Each group looked up the definition of the word on Fact Monster.  Then we made a scarecrow craft and wrote the word and definition on it.

We have been working on narrative writing for a while. This is a challenging genre and we celebrated the kids' efforts.  The students worked in groups of three to write a narrative piece about going to a pumpkin farm.  They really worked hard to cooperate and pull their ideas together into a detailed story.  After some revising we published them.

Building fluency was fun.  We began this lesson with an idea we learned about at the Smekens' workshop we attended last month.  We started reading a story aloud using choppy, monotone voices.  We kept reading like that until the kids finally asked why we were "reading like that?"  This question led us into making a fluency rubric.  Together as a class, we decided what a good, fluent reader's voice needed to sound like and what a poor fluency reader's voice sounded like.  Then students paired up to practice reading a poem for two voices from the poem book titled You Read to Me, I'll Read to You: Very Short Scary Tales to Read Together by Mary Ann Hoberman.  Students used the rubric to try and make their voices as fluent as possible.  After practicing for about 15 minutes we brought the students back to the carpet and read aloud Yo! Yes? by Chris Raschka.  We focused on how our voices should sound as we noticed punctuation marks.  We made a chart to help us remember.  They went back to practice again, being aware of the punctuation.  Next week we plan to record their performances on a podcast.  Hopefully we will be able to upload it here and share it with you.

Have a fabulous weekend.

Kim and Anne