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

Fun Science Activities with Reading and Writing

Saturday, October 26, 2013

It felt good to have a full week of school!  Sometimes short weeks are more challenging than full ones.  Don't get us wrong, we're exhausted, but a good exhausted.

Reading and writing revolved around science this week. We are wrapping up our science unit on the solar system. The students loved this unit, and enthusiastically participated in all activities. Mensa For Kids puts out great science activities to learn about the moon, and we did several of them. We did an experiment to discover why the moon has craters and why they are different sizes, we read interesting facts about the moon and rated them, and then we made a model of a moon using water colors and wrote about it.

The constellations were a big hit as well. We used the jigsaw strategy when reading a book about the stars. The students had to highlight important information the author wanted them to learn, and then each group shared information about their chapter with the rest of the class. A fun hands-on activity was making constellation tubes and star finders. To check their understanding we did a five minute power write about constellations.

The solar system was the final topic in our unit. Using the game twenty questions, the students had to guess what was in the two giant garbage bags. A blow-up sun and planets were in the bag. The students went crazy! We sang a song to help us put the planets in order. You probably have heard the song before, but here it is. It is sung to the tune Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. We don't know who wrote the song, so we can't give credit where credit is due. Every time we placed a new planet in its order, we sang the song, because this was the target goal for the lesson.

Mercury, Venus, Earth, and Mars,

These are the planets among the stars

Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus too

Neptune, Pluto

Now we're through

Planets are in the Milky Way

This is what we learned today.

Yes, we know Pluto is not a planet anymore, and the students remind us of that constantly, but it goes with song, and Pluto is still there.

We found a cute new art project on Pinterest to help us remember the order of the planets. Last year we made a candy model, this year it was a construction paper model.

The planets can orbit around the sun.  They have to hold onto one leg of the brad and spin the black paper.

We also watched this very entertaining movie from YouTube. The speakers' accents are a little difficult to understand, but the students didn't seem to have a problem with it, and it does have some cool facts.

Next week we will tell you about our Snapple-Lid Reading Party.  It was great fun and we learned about it at the Smekens' conference!!!

Kim and Anne

Short Week, Short Blog, Good Stuff

Saturday, October 19, 2013

Last weekend we were able to finish our lesson plan that goes with the story The Bremen Town Musicians retold by Carol Pugliano-Martin.   If you would like to check it out here is the link: The Bremen Town Musicians.

We attended a great workshop on Thursday through Smekens Education Solutions Inc. It was titled, Strategies for Teaching Reading With Small Group Instruction. The presenter, Kristi McCullough has a wealth of knowledge. Her ideas were appropriate for grades two through six and could be readily implemented. This was the same company that put on the writing conference that Kim went to in August, and this one was just as inspiring as that one. As Kim mentioned before, if you ever have a chance to go to one of their workshops, jump on it! Here is the link to their website: Smekens Education Solutions Inc.

One of the teachers in our building found a great website that unpacks the Common Core State Standards for all grade levels.  We found this to be so useful because it makes the vague language of the CCSS more understandable.  We hope you find this site as useful as we did.

Another thing we keep reading and hearing about concerning the Common Core is teachers using exemplar texts with their students.  These texts are samples of the complexity and rigor of the texts the students will be required to read and comprehend on the PARCC assessment.  We found a website that has these texts as well as activities that accompany them.  Here is the site: Exemplar Texts and Tasks.

Next week we will be back with some fun activities we did with our students.  It's a full week with zero interruptions so hopefully we will have a lot to share with you.

Kim and Anne

Lots of Independent Work and Facilitation

October 12, 2014

Hi everyone. It was another busy week for us. This week we challenged our students to read and engage in comprehension activities with a partner while we facilitated. We supported them as they struggled through the learning process, but in the end, everyone was proud of their accomplishments and hard work.

We spent a lot of time wrapping up the concept of day and night. When we teach our astronomy unit at the beginning of the year, this concept is very challenging for our students. We did many hands-on activities, and reading and writing activities to hopefully solidify why we have night and day. The Aims Math and Science site has a great activity called Dizzy Spells that not only teaches day and night, but also addresses where the sun is in the sky during different times of the day.

After several hands-on activities, the students went online to read about why we have day and night. Previously, we had taught the skill of sketch-to-stretch to help us visualize nonfiction information when we were reading about the sun, so this time we wanted students to apply this strategy while reading with a partner. Partners had to first read the text, and then go back for a close reading, to decide what information was important and what they needed to know. They then sketched this important information.

Our final activity with day and night was to make the well known model of the sun and earth, with the earth rotating on its axis to show night and day. Students then had to demonstrate their understanding by writing about what makes day and night in their science notebooks.

Doing a close read of A Walk in the Desert by Caroline Arnold to find the main idea and details was the next challenge for our students. Of the five paragraphs they had to analyze, two of them were done whole group. The other three were completed with a partner. Students worked hard to infer the main idea with two of the paragraphs.

You would think that all this hard work would tire our students out, but they were actually energized by  their success. Thank goodness, because we were really hesitant to let them do these activities on their own. However, we know that the latest discussions about reading instruction place importance on having students working with more complex texts and tasks.  It also spotlights having students engage in meaningful conversations with their peers. This promotes deep understanding of what has been read.

Our last challenge about did us in! We introduced five different kinds of leads to our students. We found books that had an example of each type of lead, and students had to work with their table mates to identify them. This was much more difficult than we thought it would be! We found ourselves literally cheering when they got one right. As if that wasn't challenging enough, we thought we would push them a little more. In their groups, they had to write their own examples of each type of lead. It was really hard, and they needed a lot of support, but we got through it! As we began our class narrative, they chose to use an Imagine This lead. Because of their independent practice, we were able to come together as a class to write a very detailed introduction to our narrative writing.

Next week is an unusual week for us. The students are off on Tuesday and Wednesday while we have School Improvement meetings, and then we are at a reading conference on Thursday. So, we will only see our students one day. In our blog next week, we will share articles and any good things we learned at the conference.

Kim and Anne

October 5, 2013

Good morning! We hope everyone is doing well. This week we completed our Henry and Mudge unit, a cute writing poem project, science with UV beads, and we also started our Global Read Aloud project!

Our revamping of the Henry and Mudge lesson for our independent readers was a huge success. They are getting closer to the learning target of understanding direct and indirect characterization. Completing the character web together using the book, Henry and Mudge Take the Big Test,  helped make finding evidence to infer character traits more concrete. Another thing that helped was giving them a list of character traits to use when partner reading other Henry and Mudge books. They were able to use those traits to find evidence to match them.

Reading for trait evidence.

Working hard on this challenge.

Like the pieces of  a puzzle, a character's traits fit together to make him who he is.

Power writing to reflect on what we've learned.

Our more guided group used the story board to write a retelling of Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night. The story board truly helped them retell the story through the use of their retelling bag.

Our writing this week focused on ideas and details through writing a list poem. The students got a kick out of listening to the Shel Silverstein poem, "Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out," and the Jack Prelutsky poem, "Bleezer's Ice Cream." We used these poems to introduce list poems that are organized with a beginning, middle, and end. Then, students wrote their own list poems about themselves and made their portraits.

First drafts with revisions.

We can't thank Steve Spangler enough for all of his creative and inviting science lessons. Once again our students were totally engaged in the scientific method as they learned about the UV rays from the sun.

In the classroom; no uv rays, in the sun, in the shade.

Our Global Read Aloud started this week! Our students loved listening to the book, Marty McGuire by Kate Messner. But, the best part for them was blogging about their thoughts. They cannot wait to hear back from their second grade friends in North Carolina!

Signing off now to go and plan more fun activities for next week!
Kim and Anne