Now that we have finished up our conference presentations and most students have finished their pirate stories and biographies, we will be moving on to informative writing about biomes/habitats to go with our science unit. Just like we did with the biographies, students will be able to choose which biome/habitat they would like to research. Students will fill out an organizer as they do their research to collect their information. Next students will write their information into an informative research report about their biome/habitat. Students will then be able to share their information in groups with other students who chose a different biome/habitat. Students will learn/talk about the plants and animals that live in that biome/habitat and what life/weather is like there.
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To go along with all of the important people we have been and will be learning about during S.S. time, students have been working on biographies. 2nd grade made a list of important people we are covering during S.S. time and then students chose who they wanted to do their biography on. Each person on the list could only have up to 2 students writing about them. Students chose from: Abraham Lincoln, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Theodore Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy, Martin Luther King Jr., Marcenia Lyle Stone (AKA Toni Stone), Bessie Coleman, Amelia Earhart, Jane Goodall, Jackie Robinson, and Roberto Clemente. Once students chose their person, they used our class iPads to do research about their person on Epic!, PebbleGo, and Google Jr. Students filled out a graphic organizer as they did their research. Once they finished their research, students organized it and wrote it out into sentences to form a report. The final step is to find a picture of their important person to use in ChatterPics and have students use the app to make it seem like that person is telling about their life. Students who have finished, have posted it to their Class Dojo Portfolio for you to see. Some students are still finishing up theirs. Ask your child if they have finished, and go check out their Class Dojo portfolio to see it in action. It's a lot of fun. :)
We have finished up our personal narratives and are moving on to writing creative narratives. To start this off, students will write a pirate stories. We are using a lot of mentor texts and learning that good stories need to have interesting characters, a setting or 2, a problem, different events that happen along the way, and a solution to the problem. We have done brainstorming for each of these things and students are now getting started with organizing that information to create their pirate story. Once they've finished with that they should be able to take that same structure and apply it to writing a made-up, creative story of their own choosing.
You may have heard your students talking about Boot Camp. We are doing our basic training in writing through Writing Boot Camp. We started by taking a light bulb paper and writing down any ideas we have that we can write about (going to the zoo, Great America, Disney World, Wisconsin Dells, sleepovers, birthdays, holidays, Disney on Ice, circus, losing a tooth, school, friends, family, any vacations or special events...). Once we finished brainstorming the ideas we could think of, we shared our ideas with our table groups to see if we could add more to our list that we didn't think of. Then we shared as a whole class. This helped most of the students to fill their light bulb up. Next we moved on to talk about narrowing those ideas down from a Big Moment to a Small Moment. We demonstrated this by holding are arms out to the side straight and just keeping them there for a minute. The students arms started to get tired. We talked about how Big Moments are like that, they stretch out too big and are too much. We then swooped our arms in to narrow down our moment. So for instance instead of talking all about school, narrow it down to the first day of school, or your favorite class/subject in school. The students then got their writing boot camp dog tags and made their boot camp bags. After they created their bags they chose one big moment from their idea page and then decided how to narrow down that to a small moment. My example for them was: big moment - Disney World, small moment - Early Morning Magic at Magic Kingdom our first day. Then students got supply cards. They wrote out a detail on each supply card to pack into their boot camp bag. Once their bags were packed, they were ready to begin writing. They needed to put their details in order and add opening and closing sentences. We did mini-lessons on complete vs. incomplete sentences, simple and compound sentences, and plain vs. fancy sentences. After that we talked about the next step in the writing process, Revising. We used my writing as an example. We went sentence by sentence to see if I could add an details or adjectives to my sentences to make them better. We used blue colored pencil to insert them. Students then worked on doing this to their own writing. Next up we will do mini-lessons for Editing and students will learn how to edit their writing (look for capitals, punctuation, and spelling errors) and use red to fix their mistakes.
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