Welcome back! This week in 2nd-grade was all about summarizing, time, and letter writing!
Reading
Our focus strategy was summarizing this week in reading. Summarizing is a daunting task, especially 2nd graders, so I decided to focus on the Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then method to writing a summary!
I don't have a picture of the anchor chart I made, but it looks very similar to the one pictured below.
After I modeled the strategy, they got to practice the next day with a partner! The partner pair got to choose a book (I pulled a handful of Arthur books) and read the story together. As they were reading the story they had to record the parts of a summary in a foldable I whipped up. It was meaningful, engaging, and fun!
I was so proud of them as they were working together to complete their foldable! I love seeing my students engaged and thinking critically about the text with one another... it really makes my heart happy!
Throughout the week in reader's workshop I gave them a choice to work on a past skill (main idea, story structure, etc.) with their independent reading or to practice summarizing the book that they were reading. All of them chose to keep practicing summarizing!
Math
This week in math we finished up our short money unit and moved onto time! In 2nd- grade they have to be able to tell time to 5 minutes, so we focused this week on telling time to the hour and half- hour, as well as starting to practice 5 minutes.
I stumbled across Magic of Math units by Amy Lemons over at Step Into Second Grade and decided to go ahead and try the time unit. I love her resources! They are super engaging and hands-on... the kids love them! She currently has units available for 2nd and 3rd grade math. With that being said, mostly everything used to introduce time this week is from her Magic of Math: Time unit!
To introduce time we made a giant hula hoop clock as well as an anchor chart explaining the steps to tell time. They thought this clock was SO cool! It kept them engaged as well as offered a hands- on way to practice telling time. We re-built our hula hoop clock every day to review the steps in telling time on an analog clock.
Below are some of the guided practice/ partner games that we played this week to help us practice telling time.
They rolled dice to make the hour and then put it on top of the card with the minutes. They then had to make that time on their mini- clock and check each others work!
Here had to roll a die then write the digital or draw analog time on the corresponding recording sheet. Super engaging!
On Friday before my lesson we reviewed with a game of musical time, which is just like musical chairs, but with time! Once they stopped at a chair they had to tell their neighbor the time while my para and I checked to see if they were correct. We had a lot of fun with this.. it was the perfect way to wrap up our week in math and clear up any misconceptions!
Writing
This week in writing we started our friendly letter writing unit. There is so many things that you can do with letter writing, so we are having a lot of fun with it!
We started off the unit with the mentor text First Year Letters. We read the letters in the story, talked about the five parts of a letter, made an anchor chart, and started writing. r
Throughout the week we wrote a shared letter to a 1st grade class and a 4th grade class, started a pen-pal system with one of the other 2nd- grade classes, and wrote letters to other adults in the building.
There you have it! That's a snapshot of what happened in our classroom this week.
Happy teaching,
Brennan
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