Friday, January 31, 2014
Well we didn't get our wish...we were out of school both Monday and Tuesday of this week. Right now we have a big snow storm heading our way. They are predicting 8-12 inches! Enough already! Needless to say we don't have any finished products to post this week. We are in the middle of everything. Hopefully we will have a five day week next week and some exciting things to share with you.
Hope you have a great weekend and are not snowed in like we are going to be.
Kim and Anne
Friday, January 31, 2014
Friday, January 24, 2014
Similes, Native Americans and Polygons
January 24, 2014
Hi Everyone! We have survived another frigid week in Chicago, but it seems the worst is yet to come, as the forecast calls for horrible weather at the beginning of next week.
Before moving into expository writing, we decided to have one more crack at adding sensory images and supporting details to our writing. We did this by introducing similes to our students. We began by reading the books, My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks by Hanoch Piven, and Crazy Like a Fox, A Simile Story by Loreen Leedy. We also read two simile snow poems, and students had to identify the similes. Then, students had to write their own winter similes. We weren't sure how they would turn out, based on their oral responses, but we were quite pleased with the results.
We started the non-fiction part of our Native American unit. Kim found a great formative assessment to gage how much background knowledge students had about them. It was called, "Agreement Circles" from Page Keeley's book, Science Formative Assessment. It was a physical way for students to not only demonstrate their background knowledge, but to also defend their thinking. Before reading the poem called Native Americans, students were given pictures of different Native American ways of life, and they had to sort the pictures however they wanted. The poem introduced students to the different cultural regions and ways of life for the Native Americans. It was a complex poem, but after discussing it, the students were then able to resort the pictures that matched the different cultural regions.
To complete the lesson, we made a map of the different regions and revisited the "Agreement Circle." The students were more decisive, and able to defend their thinking with specific information they had learned from the poem. It really was a good formative assessment!
We had more fun with polygons this week. We found that our students really didn't know the different types of polygons, so they needed lots of practice with them. We found a great polygon lesson from AIMS Education called "Pondering Polygons." The geoboard activity was a big hit, as well as the Pick a Polygon game.
Those were the highlights of the week for us. Hopefully we will have a five day week to write about next week! Keeping our fingers crossed!
Kim and Anne
Hi Everyone! We have survived another frigid week in Chicago, but it seems the worst is yet to come, as the forecast calls for horrible weather at the beginning of next week.
Before moving into expository writing, we decided to have one more crack at adding sensory images and supporting details to our writing. We did this by introducing similes to our students. We began by reading the books, My Dog is as Smelly as Dirty Socks by Hanoch Piven, and Crazy Like a Fox, A Simile Story by Loreen Leedy. We also read two simile snow poems, and students had to identify the similes. Then, students had to write their own winter similes. We weren't sure how they would turn out, based on their oral responses, but we were quite pleased with the results.
We started the non-fiction part of our Native American unit. Kim found a great formative assessment to gage how much background knowledge students had about them. It was called, "Agreement Circles" from Page Keeley's book, Science Formative Assessment. It was a physical way for students to not only demonstrate their background knowledge, but to also defend their thinking. Before reading the poem called Native Americans, students were given pictures of different Native American ways of life, and they had to sort the pictures however they wanted. The poem introduced students to the different cultural regions and ways of life for the Native Americans. It was a complex poem, but after discussing it, the students were then able to resort the pictures that matched the different cultural regions.
To complete the lesson, we made a map of the different regions and revisited the "Agreement Circle." The students were more decisive, and able to defend their thinking with specific information they had learned from the poem. It really was a good formative assessment!
We had more fun with polygons this week. We found that our students really didn't know the different types of polygons, so they needed lots of practice with them. We found a great polygon lesson from AIMS Education called "Pondering Polygons." The geoboard activity was a big hit, as well as the Pick a Polygon game.
Those were the highlights of the week for us. Hopefully we will have a five day week to write about next week! Keeping our fingers crossed!
Kim and Anne
Monday, January 20, 2014
Two New Products on Teachers Pay Teachers
Monday, January 20, 2014
We are a day late, but our lesson plans for The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and The Legend of the Bluebonnet are up on our Teachers Pay Teachers store. Hope you can check them out. Let us know what you think.
We are a day late, but our lesson plans for The Legend of the Indian Paintbrush and The Legend of the Bluebonnet are up on our Teachers Pay Teachers store. Hope you can check them out. Let us know what you think.
Saturday, January 18, 2014
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
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
Saturday, December 14, 2013
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.
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
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
Saturday, December 7, 2013
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
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
Saturday, November 30, 2013
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
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
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