Daily 5 - Read to Someone

All year we have been doing Daily 5 reading in our second grade classroom. The Read to Someone choice hasn't always been a successful time for every reader.  Even with lots of coaching and reteaching some children continue to have only one partner read the entire time...until now!  My students are loving the "You Read to me, Ill Read to You" books by Mary Ann Hoberman and Michael Emberly.  If you haven't discovered these books yet I highly recommend them.  My class especially loves the Very Short Fairytales book.

Do you have any suggestions for making Read to Someone successful for students?

Mountains Full of Art

Enjoy when you can, and endure when you must. ~Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Today we enjoyed art and writing very much.  We started exploring the different kinds of lines we could make.  After our line exploration we thought about hills and mountains.  We discussed which lines would be best to use when drawing hills and which lines would be best for drawing mountains.  We decided on curved lines for the hills and jagged lines for the mountains.  After sketching their hills and mountains students used crayons to color their pictures.  Once the picture was colored students painted them with a "wash" using water color cakes.  Here a few of my favorites.

Students were also introduced to writing "found poetry" today.  Together we read an informational piece about mountains, highlighted our favorite words and phrases and put those words/phrases into a poem.  I am looking forward to trying this writing strategy again during our folktale unit.

Check out Reflecting on Student Work in Staff Meetings (TEMPLATE)

Check out Reflecting on Student Work in Staff Meetings (TEMPLATE).

Counting Money

This week we are doing some review of money and counting coins before we head into our next math unit; Games, Graphs and Toys.  I made a strategy poster of the three ways to count coins and a worksheet for a math station where students practice counting baggies of coins.  There are 12 bags of coins for students to count while at the station.  In our upcoming math unit students will explore the idea of making purchases and receiving change so a little review should be helpful!

Counting Coins


Counting Coins Worksheet

Guided Exlporation

Here are a few pictures showing how "Guided Exploration" is going down in my second grade classroom.  I am calling it Guided Exploration because I am purposefully making activities available that students have expressed interest in as well as activities that support what we are learning throughout the day (reading, writing, math, science, social studies).  

This where some of our materials are located.

Do you allow your students to explore freely?  If so, what kinds of activities do you make available?

Biographies

Call me crazy but I decided to dive into another research project with my second graders. I like to integrate what we are doing as much as possible so we are up to our eyeballs in biographies this month (reading, writing, social studies). I found a great Wax Museum research packet on the Teachers pay Teachers website.  Each student is hard at work finding out as much as they can about their famous person. During our previous research project my students worked in pairs.  This time they are researching independently. I think the most amazing part of this is that they are learning to take notes like "big kids!"  They are so proud of themselves. I have tweaked a couple of the research ideas in the Wax Museum packet so I could stay consistent with the research strategy we were already using.  Here is a picture of what we have done so far...

What have we done so far?


1. We spent two days exploring biographies.
2. On day 3 students chose a famous person to research.
3. I modeled writing down "dash-facts" while we read about Helen Keller.
4. Students had three 40 minute work sessions to read and collect "dash-facts" about their famous person.
5. Students cut dash facts apart and organized them into four categories (fame, childhood, contributions and fun facts) using a mini pocket book.
6. Students wrote paragraphs for each category using their facts.  I modeled how to do this using our Helen Keller research.


Where we are headed?


7. Students will edit their drafts and write a final version.
8. Students will write up a plan for their wax-museum costume with their parents over the weekend.
9. Students will learn how to take their research and turn it into a speech.
10. Students will write and practice speeches.
11. Students will participate in a wax-museum where they come to life and share about themselves with their families, schoolmates and friends.

I love the Blog Catching Readers Before they Fall.  In her January 22nd post, Playing with the Big Kids, Katie Keier suggested giving 2nd graders an exploration time during the day.  Over the weekend I did some brainstorming and came up with a second grade version of "Guided Exploration." We started on Tuesday morning and we all loved it!  In 20 minutes the following occurred: A students water color painting of an owl led to a discussion with three other students about what they learned about owls last year.  Another student exploring magnets wondered why they "wouldn't stick together like they were supposed to" so we pulled out some books about magnets for him to read.  He discovered that magnets have poles and that opposite poles don't attract to each other.  He also discovered there was a special magnetic rock called lodestone (all of which he explained to me and several classmates in great detail).  Four little ones problem solved and divided up tasks while building different kinds of race tracks with geoblocks.  Another group of students painting with water colors shared techniques that they knew with each other.  This was such an "aha!" moment for me.  I LOVED listening to them share with each other as well as being invited in by them to participate in their activities.  I have a feeling they will be teaching me a lot more than I bargained for during this exploration time.  I can't wait to see what I learn from them tomorrow! Thanks Katie!