Monday Made It with Some Help

This week I'm giving a shout out to my kiddos. With their help, I have had a great couple of weeks. I have one Made-It and my sweetie pies have one they'd like to share.

It all begins with the simple sentence in 2nd grade, but quickly progresses into expanded sentence. Practice is important so after a week of writing simple sentences, I have set up the Write a Sentence Station. The kids can manipulate subjects, verbs, and adjectives to write simple sentences and expanded sentences.

My kiddos started their Interactive Writing Notebooks last week. This week we added our Juicy Details page, which helped them write expanded sentences using adjectives.

After making our notebook pages, we wrote expanded sentences about the foods we described. Lastly, we revised our class narrative by adding "Juicy Details." I love how things just fall into place!

First Week of 2nd Grade

It's back to school! Back to the rules and procedures and back to waking up REALLY early! 

Our first week was like most. We spent time discussing rules and procedures. We talked about manners and my favorite, tattling. OK tattling is definitely not my favorite, but talking about what tattling is and is not is my favorite. Why? Because once we talk about it, I rarely hear tattling. It's a miracle! I used this freebie by Kelly Witt from TpT. I highly recommend it.

On Tuesday I pulled out the base ten blocks. Of course kids look at them and want to play. So I give the kids time to play with them. Once we've played, they are no longer toys, but tools for learning. I'm so mean.

At the end of the day on Tuesday, we pulled out the magnets and went to work, or play. It's so funny to watch kids discover with magnets. They are probably the coolest thing ever!

 

We used The Recess Queen throughout the week to identify story structure and to discuss how to handle those not-so-nice kids on the playground.  

 

I used this writing unit to get students started. 

 

The kids worked with their groups to identify the characters. 

This is Mean Jean. I love it!

 The next day the kids worked to identify the setting.

I think it's pretty awesome this guy spelled too correctly.

We also got started on/reviewed how to write a complete sentence. The real plan was getting kids started on an activity that could be done for homework and for a station. I used the ideas from this TpT product.

The kids made flip books to write some silly sentences.

All in all it was a great week. I have some really cool kids. I love my job. Teaching is one of the most challenging jobs out there, but I wouldn't want to do anything else. And it takes a pretty awesome person to do it!