Being a book girl, you know I love pairing great literature with our themes. Here are my top picks of Earth Day favorites. I love the book The Wump World by Bill Peet. The little Wumps are so cute, and it has such a great message. The kids always seem to make great connections to […]
Dirt Pudding
Have you ever made dirt pudding? This is another fun activity to do around Earth Day, or anytime you want to have your kids practice using some functional text. We recently finished a unit on functional text. Students need practice in reading recipes and following written directions. This would be a great culminating activity and […]
Commas in a Series
Here are some activities I have done recently to teach commas in a series. This seems to be a standard that spans many grade levels. I made this cute anchor chart. I recommend laminating it BEFORE you add your sentence. That way, if you use an erasable marker, you can change the sentence out periodically […]
Peanut Butter, Jelly TIME! Using Functional and Informational Text in the Classroom
Happy National Peanut Butter Day!! This week I was tasked with working on a close reading of functional and informational text. I needed to incorporate main idea, text features, and vocabulary. No problem! Actually, it was! I usually end up trolling TPT or making my own resources, which I do enjoy. This time, I got […]
Martin Luther King Jr. Timeline Activity
We have been learning all about Martin Luther King Jr. this week with a lot of fun activities. One of the class favorites was comparing brown eggs and white eggs. We observed the outsides of the eggs and and how they looked different. Once cracked open, the children were amazed that the eggs were identical […]
Stone Soup!
This was a really fun week for me at school. My class did a little ELA unit using the story Stone Soup. I used the Reading A-Z version for the students, and then read aloud the classic Marcia Brown version. We compared and contrasted the folktales with an anchor chart: For writing, I used this […]
Accountable Talk in Close Reading (Notice and Note)
Hi friends! We are back with another installment of our summer book study of Notice and Note- Strategies for Close Reading. Today we are working on pages 27-38. (This is where it gets meaty!) It is all about implementing accountable talk strategies during close reading. Question 5- What is the role of talk? This session […]
Close Reading With Wordless Books
Thanks to Deanna for hosting a linky about my most favorite things- BOOKS! Can you do a close reading with a (nearly) wordless book? YES! You CAN! I am a HUGE fan of David Wiesner’s books and was super thrilled when his latest book, Mr. Wuffles! won the Caldecott Medal of Honor this year. His […]
Don’t be SO Tacky! Teaching Informal and Formal Language
Common Core has made us look at language skills in a different way. One new skill for second grade is teaching formal and informal language. I made some resources to help my students learn this skill using one of my favorite books-Tacky the Penguin. I couldn’t think of any more perfect character to teach the […]
A Bundle of Sticks- Classbuilding
So my year is off and running and my class did our first close reading activity with Aesop’s fable “A Bundle of Sticks.” I thought it was a great little story to introduce fables (2.RL.2) and also to bring in a little character education at the beginning of the year. The story tells of an old […]