Sorry I've been MIA the past month... the beginning of the school year proved to be more overwhelming than I anticipated. But now I'm back and hoping to get back to posting. For now I am setting a small goal - once a week I will post about things that went well in my classroom. If I get more than one post in, great! So for this week, here's what we did and what went well:
We read the story Owl Moon and used many of the activities from this unit to guide our instruction. My favorite part of this mini-unit was having the students create their own mental pictures based on a page from the text. They came out great and I've noticed an improvement in my students' own narrative writing after focusing on descriptive language/imagery during these activities. Here are some examples of our mental images:
Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)
In ELA we are also learning about subjects and predicates. The students created subject/predicate foldables based on an idea I saw on Pinterest (where else?!?!). We have actually been practicing finding the subject/predicate for two weeks now - this has been a tricky concept for my kiddos. But we are getting there!
My 2nd graders were practicing short vowel words, so I used the short vowel picture discs found here to create a fun center for them called Monster Short Vowel Match Up. I wanted my students to practice determining the short vowel sound in a given word without actually seeing the word (which all worksheets in our reading program did - grrr!) so I had them use these discs instead. My littles worked in their small reading groups on this center. Each child took a turn picking a card from the pile and deciding which monster to "feed" it to. They were challenged to feed the monsters all the "food" before their time at that center ran out. They also had to fill out the worksheet below. The worksheet was a way for me to see if they were able to spell the word on their own with the correct vowel sound. For such a simple center, the kiddos had a ball! I plan to bring these monsters back under different aliases throughout the year for other word work centers. :)
My 3rd graders were practicing long vowels using the VCe pattern. We used activities taken from here to practice this skill. I have found my students always LOVE the I Have, Who Has? games and try to incorporate them as much as possible!
In science we have finished up our unit on butterflies and spent the past week talking about insects in general. We learned the parts of an insect and looked more closely at bees and ants. We compared these two insects to butterflies in a venn diagram. The kids were really interested in all three insects and loved these two books:
In math we FINALLY were able to start our math journals! Yay!
Here is what 2nd grade did this week:
Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)
And 3rd grade:
Photo Coming Soon (left my camera at school!)
If you are wondering, I do not teach math all together with my students but instead break into math groups for Math Workshop. I have one third grade math group and two second grade math groups. The curriculum for each grade level is too different for me to teach math through a multi-age approach but I am loving math workshop!!! I will try to post soon about how this works in my classroom.
Finally, we read Roxie and the Hooligans as our read aloud for the past two weeks. The kids LOVED this book and it was a great text to guide discussions on bullying, hurtful words, and how characters can change throughout the course of a story. Coming up next... Charlie and the Chocolate Factory!
For those of you that didn't give up on me and are still stopping by to see if anything's new, thanks! I promise to try to be a better blogger!
