Cereal Boxes

Next week we will begin another media literacy unit. We will review advertising devices used in media and delve into some more specific tactics used to target kids. The unit will culminate with designing our own cereal boxes. For this activity, I would like each child to bring in one, or more, empty cereal boxes for us to analyze and then recover with our own designs. The boxes can start coming in immediately. If possible, please try to have them in by Thursday, April 28th. 

Non Fiction Animal Research Reports

You may have heard about an activity that we are working on in class right now about animals. After learning about a variety of features of non-fiction books such as an index, glossary, table of contents, text box and caption, students were ready to put their new-found knowledge to use!

After each choosing an animal that they would like to learn more about, students were provided with a non-fiction book on that animal. They have used these books to find information on the animal's appearance, habitat, predators, diet, life cycle/babies, and any other interesting facts. I have encouraged them wherever possible to use their own words rather than copying directly from the book. They have busily working through the steps of taking jot notes, writing a rough copy, revising and editing, and now some of them are ready to begin their good copies. While I was planning on having students simply illustrate their good copies, many students were inquiring about whether or not they could bring in printed pictures of their animal and the subtopics listed above. I understand that this does take some effort and involvement on your part, and that some families may not have access to a computer and/or printer. For those reasons, I have agreed that students can bring in printed photos (black and white is fine), but I do want to be clear that this is not a requirement.  Any child that does not have printed pictures will simply illustrate their report as I originally planned. Further, students may choose to include a mixture of both pictures and self-drawn illustrations in their report.

The students have been learning a ton of really fascinating facts, and eventually we will share our learning with our peers as animal experts.

Read Aloud Presentations

Starting in March and running until May, the grade 2 students will be participating in read aloud presentations. Your child is invited to choose a picture book (i.e. no novels) from home to read to a small group in the class. The book that they choose should be one that they really enjoy and one that they think their classmates will enjoy as well. It should also be one that they can read with accuracy, expression and fluency. The explanation sheet that I am sending home today includes more information, as well as a calendar schedule for the first few weeks' worth of presentations. I will send home additional schedule calendars as we progress. 

In addition to reading the book aloud in class, students will be required to ask their classmates at least 2 questions about the story once they have finished reading. One should be a “thick” question; these are questions that require some thought and reflection to answer. They often begin with starters such as ‘Why do you think…?’,  “What do you think…?’, “How would you feel if…?’, “What might…?”, or “Why did…?’.  The second question that they ask should be a thin question- one that has an answer found in the book. They often begin with starters such as “How many…?’, “Who.,..?’, “When…?’ or 'Where…?’.  For example, a thick question for the story Goldilocks and the 3 Bears would be “Do you think the bears would have reacted different had Goldilocks asked them to visit their house?”. A thin question would be “What did Goldilocks eat at the bears’ house?”. I encourage students to practice their read aloud at home and prepare their questions in advance.

Questioning

Currently in grade 2 we are practicing asking questions while we read to deepen our understanding. We have learned about the difference between thick and thin questions. Thick questions are those that require the reader to do some deeper thinking to find an answer. Thin questions are answered quickly in the book. We are learning about these question types in conjunction with hearing stories and biographies with a Black History Month theme. 

This song is to the tune "Oh My Darling Clementine".
It does a good job of explaining the difference between thick and thin questions.

Procedural Writing

It's been a fun week! We started a new writing activity to help us with procedural writing. Before beginning any writing, students were shown pictures of structures made out of coloured blocks and had to describe to another student who had not seen the picture instructions on how to recreate the block structure. This provided students with oral practice using directional (left, right), positional (above, below), descriptive (yellow, square) and transitional words (first, next). Each student was then permitted to create their own picture of a block structure, and is now busily working on writing instructions on how to build it. Next week we will test out our writing by having each other try to follow our instructions to see if the end result produces the intended structure!

I have also introduced a weekly message activity to help build upon the grade 2 students' editing skills. In this message I will be purposefully making spelling, grammatical and organizational errors for the class as a group to find and correct. They will find these the first day we look at the message. The second day we visit the message, we will identify certain words as nouns, verbs, adjective and adverbs. Lastly, the third time we look at it, we will think of ways to improve upon it by using more interesting words, adding descriptive words or more detail.

Each student in the class has what we call a personal dictionary. This is a place for them to record words that they are learning to spell in their personal writing . These dictionaries allow them to refer back to the correct spelling for future writing projects. At the beginning of the year I was happy to write words down for them. Now that we have progressed further into the year, I am requiring students more and more to use spelling strategies to try to spell the word independently before I help them. Strategies that we have been working on are thinking of similar words that they know; (i.e. using "Grace's name to help write 'place'), chunking the word into more manageable syllables (i.e. 'sec'-'re'-'tar'-'y'); and trying first and seeing if it "looks" right. I encourage them to try these strategies when doing any writing at home as well.

Similes and Newspapers

Phew! Apologies for not updating the blog since the return from holidays. Despite the inactive blog, we certainly have been busy in grade 2 English!

I have put the popcorn sensory writing on the back burner (for now!) because the students were having so much fun in another activity. Each child was allowed to secretly choose one animal figurine and write three similes to describe it. Afterwards, they read their descriptive similes to the class and we had to guess the animal that they were describing. They did a great job with this activity and loved the mystery of it! Since then, we have started to examine the elements and characteristics of newspapers. We have learned certain newspaper terms such as headline, caption, byline and date line, as well as noticing how newspapers use different sized fonts and bolded letters in their headlines. Students are now writing personal narratives and will format them as their own newspaper article.

Have a great four day week!

Happy Holidays!

As this is our last week of school before the holiday break, there were a number of special events planned. Due to these disruptions to our regular routines, instead of learning a new spelling pattern, we reviewed a few tricky words from our class word wall.
Following our discussions about how authors "paint images" in our mind during our visualization unit, we are now turning towards doing the same in our writing by learning about how to write similes. Similes are comparisons made between two objects using the words 'like' or 'as', such as "Santa's belly shook like a bowl full of jelly" and "Ruldolph's nose is as bright as a lightbulb". After reviewing the concepts of nouns and adjectives we began to write our own similes. We will continue to practice using them in our writing after the holiday break. One activity that we will do will be to do some sensory writing with similes about popcorn. If anyone has any concerns with their child eating air popped popcorn as part of an activity, please let me know so I can accommodate for them accordingly. Thank you and have a wonderful holiday with family and friends!