Hello Everyone,
It is good to be back on the blog. We have really missed it! Chicago weather has led to an interesting start to the new year. We are finally back on track!
We spent a great amount of time over winter break writing two reading lesson plans that cover several of the Common Core State Standards. They also blend in well with our second grade social studies history curriculum on Native Americans. The plans are centered around the Tomie DePaolo books, The Legend of The Bluebonnet, and The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush. Both plans include the same common core activities: a story structure organizer to sequence events in the story, a Question-Anwer-Relationship (QAR) page, a character trait puzzle, an extended response question, and an extension activity for vocabulary. We included answer pages to go along with each activity. Our goal is to have these plans up on our Teachers Pay Teachers store Sunday afternoon. We used these plans for our formal evaluation this year, and they were both very successful. We couldn't have been happier with the students' performance, focus, and deep learning of the standards. Here are some pictures of the activities.
We don't normally talk about math on our blog, but we are starting one of our favorite units, Geometry! We love this unit because we can incorporate three of our favorite things with math: art, reading, and writing. As we learned about points and line segments, we had the students use the art method of Pointillism to create a line or circle design. This lesson came from Renee Goularte. She has great lessons on Teachers Pay Teachers. For our parallel line lesson, we used art to involve the students with the concepts in a hands-on way. They seemed to have a better understanding as they made their designs and identified parallel and not parallel lines in their writing. Some students even wrote about perpendicular lines and transversals. This lesson came from the 2007 edition of teaching preK-8: The Magazine for Professional Development.
As we move further into our geometry unit, we will be using a new website we found called Math Is Fun. You might want to check it out! We are going to begin with the Sorting Shapes activity.
In science, we are learning about the properties of solids. We learned about engineers, and how they have to think about how the properties of solids work together to hold other solids up. Students had to apply what they learned to build towers out of various solid materials that could stand alone. As an extension to this science lesson, we challenged students to build a bridge out of 25 craft sticks and 100 toothpicks. Their bridges needed to be able to support a five pound brick. Testing this week was a hit!
We know we focused on more than just literacy this week, but it always seems like everything just clicks in all areas come January, and it is a really exciting and fun time. We want to share highlights from all of these areas.
See you next week!
Kim and Anne
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