Phonemic Segmentation Cards

Wow it's been a busy school year thus far! I hope you all are off to a great start. I have been so thankful and impressed by the power of Pinterest, other teacher blogs, and Teachers Pay Teachers. We have worked so hard, and our 2nd grade hallway looks absolutely fabulous thanks a bunch to ideas found on Pinterest! 

Oh the Places You'll Go - Goal Writing

Back to School Student Glyphs

Best Part of Me Writing

All About Me Pennants

In Our Classroom Poster - Class Rules

In other news, I've created a new TpT product: Phonemic Segmentation Cards. Almost all of my products come from a need/necessity in my own classroom, so the coolest thing is that every product has been kid tested and teacher approved! These cards were developed for use in my guided reading groups, but you could really use them any time.  This is the first year in a loooong time that I've had such a high group of emergent readers in 2nd grade, so I feel like I've been learning a LOT about pre-emergent and emergent readers - something I haven't really dealt with in quite a while, even when I was looping and teaching 1st grade also! I enjoy learning, so that's a plus. :-) I feel like Jan Richardson (the author), my kindergarten teacher friends, and the title I reading teacher have kind of been my go to gurus this year! Thank goodness for these awesome ladies! 

Anyway, my sweet little pre-emergent/emergent readers are struggling to segment words, so that is why I created these cards. Students can use these to practice phonemic segmentation. The dots underneath each sound are provided to guide students to put their finger and touch and say each sound. After saying each sound, students will then blend the sounds together to read the word. These cards are designed to help students practice 1:1 correspondence with segmenting sounds. These cards can be used in a variety of ways: parent volunteers, guided reading, literacy centers, flashcards, etc... I copied these cards, laminated, and put them on a ring to have my students work on segmenting during guided reading. Please let me know if you have any questions! Hope these cards are helpful for your students who are working on sounds during guided reading or any other time!

To download these cards, click HERE or click the picture below:

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"Autumn" by Emily Dickinson - a 2nd grade poetry mini unit aligned with CCSS

It's a brand new school year, and I'm so excited to have some time to make some fresh lesson plans aligned with Common Core! I've had a nice start to the school year, and I hope you have too. 

I just posted a new mini-unit in my Teachers Pay Teachers store. This unit uses the exemplar text, "Autumn". "Autumn" is a poem by Emily Dickinson, and it is the perfect poem to use right now at the beginning of the school year. The text can also be found on the CCCSS website in Appendix B. :-)

Included, you will find the following items and resources in my mini-unit:

-Lesson plan ideas (3 days)
-Assessment: written text dependent question
-Poem typed for displaying on screen (text is also found in Appendix B of the CCSS)
-Building Background picture
-Vocabulary slides to teach 4 key words
-Poetry analysis graphic organizer
-Visualizing sheet to draw/write visualization
-Class book outline for students to analyze the text

To purchase and download the zipped file, please go to my TpT store or click HERE. You can also click the picture below:

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Opinion Writing

I am on a writing kick I've noticed. However, I really feel like the students have done a great job with writing this year, and I feel like they really understand the writing process. We've amped up the amount of writing the kiddos are doing in all subject areas, and it shows. Makes a teacher proud! :-)

Anyway, we've informally done opinion writing all year, but we started a formal unit on it just recently. Here is the anchor chart we made for opinion writing:

I'm excited to see how their writing turns out. They were allowed to write about whatever topic they chose. More pictures to come later! 

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Owl Moon and Descriptive Writing

Happy Monday! We recently finished a unit in shared reading using the book Owl Moon. This book is such a great book for helping students practice visualizing, helping them to use and apply context clues, and helping them to identify descriptive words. 

With common core, we are integrating even more writing. My students had to read the story and visualize what was happening at different point within the story. They then drew a quick pic of what they were visualizing and wrote a sentence to describe their quick pics. Then, we close read the story to find out more information about our text dependent questions. We had a book talk to discuss the story and to choose lines from the book that really spoke to us and that were powerful to the story. My students had awesome thoughts, and it's always so cool to see them analyzing a book at such a young age! 

After reading the book, we then went back and close read again to find examples of descriptive words. The students worked together to find examples and to create a list of descriptive words. There were a ton in this book! We talked about how those descriptive words can help readers paint a picture in their heads and that they help readers to use their 5 senses to imagine that they were there in the book. I found an awesome owl craftivity on Amy Lemons' TpT website that was free (check it out HERE), and I printed it on cardstock. I then traced the body of the owl on lined paper and made enough copies for each child. The students then took what they learned about descriptive writing to write Who Am I riddles. They had to write about themselves using descriptive words, and then they were able to put together the owl craftivity and color it. I then stapled it on top of their writing, and hung them on the back bulletin board. The kiddos love reading them during Daily 5 time to try to figure out whose is whose!  See the pictures below! :-) The kiddos did a super job, and we will continue to work on using descriptive words in our writing!

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Animal Research Revisited

Well, as some of you have noticed, I took a mini-hiatus from blogging and TpT. There really wasn't any particular reason, I just was enjoying some me time I guess. The hubby started a new position a few months ago, and he has his nights and weekends free now (this was quite a rarity in days of past), so we have just been nesting and enjoying spending time together, eating dinner together every night, and taking walks each evening! Anyway, I had a reader actually e-mail me to check on me and see if everything was ok since I hadn't blogged in a while. I thought that was so sweet, and it's nice to know that people are out there reading my posts, so thank you Tabitha!

Well, I think I had posted a while back about my animal research project informational writing unit that I had on TpT (go here to check it out). This unit was made out of necessity, as my own kiddos were working on this during writing a while ago. I just realized the other day that I never posted pics, so here they are!

The kiddos did a terrific job. It's so fun to see them take a piece of writing through the writing process and to see the final results! 

Anyway, have a terrific weekend, and now that I'm officially back, be expecting more posts next week!

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The Simplest of Things

Well, we've finally finished up our units on double digit addition and subtraction with regrouping (a HUGE part of 2nd grade math) - YAY! Here is one of our math anchor charts:

Common core has actually made teaching regrouping just that much easier, as students are really delving deep and making their own understanding and connections. I love having "math talks" in the classroom and hearing students explain their thinking and reasoning. We are always discussing various strategies, and it's fun to see students hear other kids and how they may have solved a problem in a different way. 

Anyway, we've started our unit on place value to 1,000, and our lesson yesterday was focused on having students find number patterns and skip count by 5's, 10's, and 100's. At the end of our lesson time, we played a little game. First, I had a 5's/10's/100's spinner on the board. 

After having a kiddo come up and spin the spinner, I would make up a number pattern based on what the spinner showed. The students would then have to either continue the number pattern or find the missing number. They would write their answer in shaving cream on their desk, and then they'd discuss with a partner and justify their answers (love that my 2nd graders are using that word and know what it means!). 

 Such a simple activity I know, but it was motivating, fun, engaging, and it got the students talking and discussing. Sometimes we as teachers need to remember that it can be the simplest of things that can be the most effective. :-)

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Comparing and Contrasting

We've spent the last week working on comparing and contrasting during Instructional Focus. The standard(s) addressed are: 2.RL.9 - Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story (e.g., Cinderella stories) by different authors or from different cultures. and 2.RIT.9 - Compare and contrast the most important points presented by two texts on the same topic.

I started out small, by first just going over what comparing and contrasting means and what it looks like. Here is our anchor chart:

Then, I had the students compare/contrast our school librarian and myself. We made a giant venn diagram (not one of my prettiest pieces of art, but hey, it works), and students wrote their thoughts on sticky notes and added it to the large venn diagram. Some of the answers were so cute. One of my personal favorites, "They both are good techers." :-) My heart is smiling for both the comment and the spelling!

Next, students were put in pairs and compared each other. After filling out a venn diagram, students had to write about their similarities/differences.

The following day, we read two books, The Three Billy Goats Gruff and The Three Silly Girls Grubb. Students then had to compare and contrast the different versions of the story. To do this, students filled out a comparison organizer and wrote about the similarities and differences. Check it out below!

The final activity we did this week was to read 2 different versions of informational text selections on bats. Students had to compare and contrast the two texts using the bat organizer. They then had to write about the similarities and differences. Here is an example of how this turned out:

Overall, it was a great set of standards to focus on for the week, and the kiddos loved the activities that went with it, and they seemed to really do well and learn a lot about comparing and contrasting. Another successful week down (two more to go until break, but who's counting???)! :-)

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Text Dependent Questions

The Common Core State Standards for reading ask that students analyze, grapple, and linger on parts of complex text in order to better understand what they are reading. To do this, students are now answering questions that can only be answered by explicitly referring back to the text being read. These kind of questions are called text dependent questions.

As we implement the CCSS ELA, we will become better and more comfortable at writing and developing these kinds of questions for our students. Hopefully this document will help you to understand how to do that.

This document has tips for you, the teacher, and it also contains 20 generic text dependent question prompts/stems (I cut these cards out and hang them on a ring for easy access, but you could post these in your room, keep a copy in your plan book, etc).

To buy a copy, head on over to TpT! Click HERE or click on the picture below.



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