What We've Been Up To and a Freebie

Mercy! The last two weeks have been super hectic for me!  We all know how very, very busy these first few weeks of school are.  But, my daughter is also playing high school volleyball.  I've been on the road A LOT!  So I am dropping in with a quick update on the things we've been up to in second grade.

Miss Nelson is Missing

After reading Miss Nelson is Missing, we completed this comprehension project about how Miss Nelson changed from the beginning of the book to the end.

I love how this student said Miss Viola Swamp changed their (the students') attitude and the paper airplanes on the other example are too cute!  The pattern for the the characters came from this TpT product by Mynda Rivera. The comprehension page is from Jen Jones - Hello Literacy.  

The students greatly enjoyed the reading fluency practice we did with this book; changing their voices to sound like Miss Swamp was fun for them and fun to hear.

The Teacher From the Black Lagoon

Seven years ago, Mike Thaler came to our school for our Annual Young Authors' Conference.  He was an incredible presenter!  I went to see his presentations although I was off work at the time going through chemo for a recurrence of my cancer.  He had recently lost his wife to cancer.  When I got to meet with him, he was very compassionate and encouraging.  I will always be grateful for that encounter.  That makes this book very special to me.  

I find that this story lends itself well to retelling practice (as well as reading with expression again!) We made paper bag books.  The children's job was to retell the story in 3 parts.  Here are some examples:

Making this booklet was super simple and the boys and girls LOVED it!  Here's a freebie... I copied these patterns for the students.  (The creature pattern, I copied on green paper.)  To make the booklets, a parent helper stapled three index cards onto paper bags.  The cards go just below the bottom fold of a flattened bag. Then the open end is folded up and tucked below the bottom flap. Hopefully, the pictures can guide you, if you would like to make paper bag books yourself. They can be used for many things; I like using them for vocabulary work.

Number Bonds

We're practicing number bonds in our class.  Here, the kids are using pennies to practice number bonds.  They flip the pennies and then record the number of heads, number of tails, and the total as a number bond. The recording sheet came from the book Building Number Sense by Catherine Jones Kuhns.  This is a great resource book, especially for K-1 teachers!  I adapt the activities according to my second graders' needs and abilities.  Now that the kids are familiar with this activity, it will become a math station.

Literacy Stations

The class has mastered our procedures for literacy stations!  Here are some of the boys and girls hard at work at a couple of their favorites.  I'll share more about our literacy stations in a future post.

Have a great week everyone!  I am off to enjoy this beautiful end-of-summer weather before tackling school work and laundry!

Yours in education,

Mrs. C.