Finally Back!

January 18, 2014

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

A Hodgepodge of Activities

Saturday, December 14, 2013

Good Snowy Morning!  The snow is really coming down here today so we will have the perfect setting for our snowflake similes and winter poems activities we are planning for next week.

This past week and next week we are doing a hodgepodge of activities to try and wrap up our social studies, guided reading, and math units.  Here are a few things we did this past week.

We listened to the story Pearl and Wagner Two Good Friends by Kate McMullan from our reading series.  This is one of the cuter stories in our series and went along perfectly with our science fair kickoff.  We decided this was an ideal story to review the very challenging skill of comparing and contrasting.  As we were reading the story to prepare for our lesson, we realized that we could easily compare and contrast the two main characters.  This was easy for us, but not so much for the students. We had to guided them through with our questioning.  Hopefully when we compare and contrast two winter poems next week, the students will have a bit more of an understanding of this concept.

As a follow-up activity, the students will partner read Pearl and Wagner Two Good Friends by Kate McMullan and do an extended response on Monday.  This is one of our free activities that you can find at our teacherspayteachers store.

The kids are getting "squirrely" as our winter break approaches, so we decided to do a favorite word study activity by Pat Cunningham.  The activity is called Does It Look Right? and we used it to solidify some long o spelling patterns. To begin, we spelled a word with three different long o patterns and the students needed to decide which spelling looked right and record it on their record sheets.  Then, they looked it up in the dictionary. The first person to find the word got to spell it to the class.  The kids have turned this into a race and have loved the competition.

Teacher's Sheet

Student Sheet

This week the perfect Aims  lesson came through Kim's Bloglovin' feed.  It mirrored a lesson we do in Everyday Math.  It is a hands-on math lesson that provides students with a concrete, real-world way to add two-digit numbers together.  It was also a fun way for students to count back change.  It's worth checking out if you have time.

Finally, we thought we would share a fun winter craft we are doing with the students.  It is a wreath made from sandwich baggies, a wire hanger, and a ribbon.  This is a gift they take home to their parents.  We have been making them for years and they are always well received.   The students manipulate a wire hanger into the shape of a circle, and then they tie on about 150 sandwich baggies.  When they are finished you just need to tie a ribbon around the top of the hanger.  This is  a great way to get them to learn how to tie.  Most kids get the hang of it after a few tries.

One more week to go before winter break!  We are planning to take a few weeks off from blogging to  to spend time with our friends and families over the holiday season.  We will also be working on lessons to gear up for the new year.  You may see some of them on our teacherspayteachers store.

Happy Holidays!
Kim and Anne

Revising and Themes

Saturday, December 7, 2013

We had a successful and productive first week back from our Thanksgiving break.  We had one of our best lessons in writing. A revising lesson that we have done for years, took on a life of its own and turned into a lesson on the writing process. The lesson comes from the book, 6+1 Traits of Writing  by Ruth Culham. In the planned lesson, students are instructed to make something out of clay. That is the only direction they get. As they are creating, we are recording comments and questions they have. After ten minutes, time is up. Then, they have two minutes to add something to their creations. After those two minutes, they have two more minutes to take something away. Finally, they are told to change something about their creations. When this is done, students title their creations, and then give each other feedback. This was the best part!

Usually, we just focus on the connection between adding, taking away, and changing their creations to revising in the writing process. But, this year, through our dialogue about their conversations, we ended up making connections to the whole writing process, especially the importance giving specific feedback during peer conferencing. It was such a success, and for life of us, we can't figure out how we couldn't see this connection before!

The following day, we had students revise a piece of writing that they had been working on during writer's workshop.

We again talked about theme in guided reading. Once we finished Unlovable by Dan Yaccarino, we tied in the target skill of story structure to help us find the theme of the story. The students then had to write what the theme was and provide evidence from the story to support their ideas. This activity is another extension that we are planning on adding to our Unlovable  lesson plan on our teachers pay teachers store over winter break.

Good luck with your holiday shopping these next few weeks! We know this can be a crazy, hectic time of year!

Kim and Anne

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