As part of Methods in Elementary Language Arts at STU, we made thematic book boxes; I chose to gather a series of books about different modes of transportation for a grade 2 class.
The purpose of this assignment was to learn about a strategy many teachers use to organize books for students to chose during Daily 5 reading centres. Box boxes can be organized two different ways- by theme, or by reading level.
The books I included in my book box include: Title Author Level Things that Go! Phidal Publishing K Duck on a Bike David Shannon H Just Me and My Mom Mercer Mayer I Angela’s Airplane Robert Munch & Michael Martchenko I Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus Mo Willems J Mater and the Little Tractors adapted by Chelsea Eberly gr. 2 Trucks Katie Daynes gr. 2 The Yellow Yacht Ron Roy N The Phantom of the Subway Geronimo Stilton O
For detailed explanation of the books and why I chose them please click the following link:
During my first internship in a grade 2 class at Harvey Elementary School we had a King of Ing day to learn all about action words.
To become a King in the land of Ing students had to learn and understand as much as possible about action words that end in 'ing' before they could receive their official King of Ing crowns. Students were challenged to look through books looking for words that ended in 'ing' in their library books to discover the word in context. They wrote as many words as they could find on the band of their crown. Once students had successfully found a minimum of ten words, and acted out a series of action words they were welcomed to the land of Ing and allowed to wear their crowns!
During this lesson students were very actively engaged and applied what they learned in their future writings.
For a complete and detailed lesson plan, please click the following link:
During my internship in a grade 2 classroom, as a creative writing project I facilitated students in creating their own "Don't Let The...." inspired by Mo Willems book Don't Let The Pigeon Drive The Bus. For this project, we began had several lesson discussing voice, speech bubbles, expression and how successfully make a book. After students decided whether they were going to work individually or in small groups (2-3), than students chose a title for their book and developed wrote an outline of their key ideas on post-it notes.
As part of this project, as an effort to incorporate technology into the classroom, I taught students the basics of Microsoft Word so they could type a good copy of their work.
In the following pictures you will see students working on the Notebook computers for the first time. During this lesson students learned how to turn on the laptops, sign in, open Microsoft work, change the font/font size, press enter, make upper case letters and add punctuation (coma's, periods, exclamation marks and question marks).
Students spent about three weeks working extremely hard writing, typing and illustrating their books, and when they had completed all that, we put the book together and created a podcast of the students reading their books and put it into a movie.
To celebrate students work we premiered our movies in class. This was an extremely valuable learning experience and very successful project that all students thoroughly enjoyed participating in.
Below you will find a picture slideshow of one groups final product and below it you will find the podcast that accompanies it.
Author Study
As part of my second internship in a grade 1 class we did an author study of Mo Willems. We focused on Willems different forms of punctuation (ellipses, exclamation marks, questions marks), adding voice to our writing, using speech and thinking bubbles, and developing characters. At the end of the project students wrote their own books that were inspired by Mo Willems using many of his writing strategies.
To the left, is a picture of the list that the students created at the end of the unit to highlight everything that they learned by writing their Mo Willems books.
Below you will find a graphic organizer I created for students to organize their thoughts before beginning the writing process as well as a couple of complete lesson plans from this unit.