We have begun to write personal narratives this week. We are looking forward to sharing the finished products with you at our Open House on September 24th. A focus lesson involved discussing how to break down an idea into a smaller portion and write about it. So, instead of being told to write about your whole entire summer which is a BIG idea (the Lucy Calkin's program calls this a 'Watermelon' idea), students use a graphic organizer to break it down into many 'small moments'.
As you can see from the above picture, this student used her 'seed ideas' to create a multitude of starting points for her next story writing. Each of these seeds is a potential story waiting to happen. Students in my class always like 'Writer's workshop' time. What do I do while students are working? I conference with each student to help them critique their writing and make it better. I also facilitate conversations between peers. Having students hear each others stories helps them improve their own writing. Here is an example of the checklist I use with them when we are having our meeting. Basically if you make learning and your expectations explicit, students aren't left guessing what they have to do to improve their work.
Sometimes a conference might be simply to help a student spell a word or ensure the story makes sense. Here is how I help students with difficult words. I have them try it first. (You can often learn so much by how a student is forming words. This can help you create your next mini-lesson. For example...you can tell I need to do some teaching around vowel sounds and word endings but this student has some excellent strategies)
Homework...and so it begins:
Each week, I will be adding one item of homework to our routine. Rather than give them all at once, I like to introduce the weekly homework one at a time. This week there will be social studies homework (Friday) and next week we begin word wall spelling words (Monday). Please check into the Homework section of this blog as I will update routinely. Generally, homework should only be about 10 minutes times the grade. So Grade Two should have about 20 minutes a night. Of course, some of this time could be reading with you before bedtime, or working on computer reading/ math programs.
Read Alouds
We have been having fun reading some chapter stories already! Can you believe it, the second week of school and we have done 2 out of these 3 books! Not to mention some of our good, old favourites like 'A Bad Case of Stripes' by David Shannon and Muncha, Muncha, Muncha by Candace Fleming. Friday is our first library day. Mr Cann our librarian always says my class knows their authors! We regularly clear out his Roald Dahl section! Although I think Mike Wade with his 'And then it happened...' books is starting to become a close second with some of my students.
Have a great week!
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