Hi Friends! Hope you are all well! Confession time... I'm a BAD BLOGGER! well... I guess you already know that already if you follow me :). I'm sorry! Between teaching, motherhood, wifehood, creating new resources, and cooking dinner... Ugh... There just isn't enough time in the day for blogging :(
Sooooo.... I think I have come up with a solution! I am going to try to create a monthly blog post about upcoming units that I will be teaching in my classroom throughout the year! My goal is to be a month ahead of schedule. So we shall see if this helps with my blogging issues!
Today I wanted to share some of the things we have been up to in my classroom these past few weeks!
My district uses Pearson Reading Street for our Reading Program. Each week, we have a main selection story to read, comprehension skills, reading strategies, grammar, phonics and writing to accomplish throughout the entire week during our reading block. This week we read the story called Firefighters. My kiddos worked on my Stop, Drop and Roll flip flap books to apply what they learned about Firefighters and being safe if there were ever a fire in their home. Here is an image of what they created....
We worked on Multiple-Meaning Words, Prefixes, and Fact and Opinion.
For our Multiple-Meaning Words, I used my Reading Tab-Its and we completed these during my guided reading groups as part of our Word Work for the week.
And we worked on Fact and Opinion using my Fact Finders Tab-Its Booklet...
In math, we have been knee-deep in MONEY...actually... I wish I were knee-deep in money..I digress..LOL
We have worked on counting money, making change, problem solving multi-step problems, working on part/part/whole with money amounts, and decomposing money to add.
It has been a busy two weeks in math. We just completed the unit and as an authentic assessment, my students completed
Then.... THEY ARRIVED... The CRAYFISH.. Yes... we learn about Crayfish in our Second Grade classroom. We use a program called Science 21 created by Putnam Northern Westchester BOCES.
Here they are....
We do many different activities, experiments and observations with our Crayfish. I wanted to add a little pizzaz to this unit instead of just giving my kiddos a worksheet for each activity. So I created a Crayfish Flip Flap Book. Each page of the booklet corresponds to the activity or lesson that I need to
do with my kiddos. They were so excited when I broke this bad boy out!
So far, we have completed our first observation and our measurements of our crayfish.
We alternate our Science and Social Studies units in second grade. We just finished our unit on US Symbols and the Branches of Government. We completed our Traveling Tourists suitcases where we traveled around the USA to read and learn about different US Symbols and all of our new found information was tucked neatly inside of our "suitcases"....not to mention our COOL passports that we stamped at each destination! My kids LOVED this unit...
After we finished our Traveling around the USA, we decided to spend some more time in Washington DC to learn about the Branches of Government.
We read my mini-reader as a class and had a VERY long discussion about the government... boy...that is a hard concept to teach! Lots of information to soak in :)
During my Daily 5 block, ALL of my students must rotate through my Work on Writing Station. I always add some type of non-fiction research activity in this station. This past week, my students have worked on my Solar System Tab-Its... They were SO ENGAGED!!!! They LOVED learning about the solar system and did a FABULOUS JOB on their research! Check them out...
