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!