Fairy Tale Recounts

The past two weeks in English, we have been working with fairy tales and learning how to retell one in our own words. We studied the main structure of all fairy tales including the setting, characters, problem or goal, 3-4 main events and the solution. After a variety of activities that allowed the students a chance to become familiarized with these components, students each chose one fairy tale to retell to a small group of peers. We made "yellow brick roads", which were paths made out of 8 squares of yellow bristol board, each labelled with one of the components of a fairy tale (setting, characters, etc) that the children walked on as they practiced retelling their tales. The classes really enjoyed this kinesthetic practice and I was very impressed with the final results of their presentations. 

In earlier posts, I described the classroom management tool that I had been using called the Bingo board. I wanted to try something new, so I have replaced the Bingo board with the Bead board. Each student in the class has a pipe cleaner hanging from the wall. When they are caught working hard, answer one of my challenge questions correctly, modelling good behaviour, helping out, or they "beat the teacher" (catching an error or omission that I make!), I have them add a bead to their pipe cleaner. Sometimes the class will earn a "class bead" and the whole class will be rewarded with a bead each. At the end of the month, the pipe cleaners and beads are taken down, and each student gets to take it home as a bracelet. The kids have really taken to this incentive and I am finding it much easier to manage. 

A relatively new weekly activity that we have begun is called "Mystery Word". Each week, I choose a new secret word from our word wall. Then, each day, I reveal one clue that will help students guess the word. The clue may be the part of speech the word is, the number of letters, an antonym for the word, etc. This activity has been a hit! If the students guess the word correctly before the end of the week, they receive a bead on their pipe cleaner as a prize.

Next up: some grammar! We will be reviewing parts of speech (adjectives, adverb, nouns and verbs), as well as word endings ('ed' for past tense, and words that change before an ending is added such as baby to babies, ride to riding, cut to cutting). 

PBS Kids Website

This week we have been using cereal boxes to discuss how marketers target kids. We have been looking at cereal boxes and their use of strategies such free products or toys, shelf placement, slogans, catchy descriptions, highlighting certain ingredients, cartoon characters, and even colour choice to make their product more appealing. My students loved looking at the website:http://pbskids.org/dontbuyit/advertisingtricks/cerealbox_flash.html and asked that I publish it here so that they could explore it further at home.

Cereal Boxes

Next week we will begin another media literacy unit. We will review advertising tricks used in media and delve into some more specific tactics used to target kids. The unit will culminate with designing our own cereal boxes. For this activity, I would like each child to bring in one, or more, empty cereal boxes for us to analyze and then re-cover. If possible, please have them in by Friday April 24^th. 

Questioning Unit

My apologies for not having posted in the past couple of weeks while we finished up our persuasive paragraph writing unit. My goal is to post once a week in order to keep you all in the loop, but somehow I fell short on that recently!

We have begun a new unit based on the reading comprehension strategy of questioning. When readers learn to question while reading, they are learning that asking questions can lead them to a greater understanding of the text, while being encouraged to be curious readers. Readers will learn that not all questions have answers, and often these unanswered questions will help them to get at the heart of the story and to analyze deeper than those that can be answered. We call these "deep thinking" or "thick" questions in class.

Welcome Back after March Break!

Over the next couple of weeks, I will be teaching my grade two students how to write persuasive paragraphs using the format of a topic sentence, three sentences to support the point of view, and a concluding sentence. I use the analogy of a hamburger: the bun pieces are the introduction and concluding sentences and the "meat and toppings" are the reasons for thinking that way. As always, before getting to any independent writing, we will spend time orally practicing how to support our points of view and writing many examples of persuasive paragraphs together as a whole group.

Tomorrow, March 24, community resident Mark Sutcliffe will be running 50km across Ottawa in an effort to  raise $50K for United Way. You can read more about it here:
http://ottawacitizen.com/news/local-news/sutcliffe-chases-goal-of-50-km-run-for-50000-united-way-donation  We will take a short break from our persuasive paragraph discussions to help cheer him on tomorrow morning as he passes by our school.

Animal Reports, etc.

The students are continuing to use their non fiction animal books to research and write short reports.  Next week I will be splitting the class into two groups. Presenters will sit with one person at a time to answer questions about their animal. We will brainstorm as a class potential questions that can be asked of the presenter- both "thin" questions (questions that can be answered from facts in report itself), and "thick" questions (questions that require a bit more thought, or opinion). The children have really enjoyed writing their reports and seem to have learned a lot of interesting information about their animals to share! 

This week, the word wall word duotang contained words that your child has chosen to practice from past weeks. Next week there will be five more words, as well as a new activity to help practice the words at home. 

We have also been reviewing some of the vowel rules in the classroom, namely the "magic e" and "when two vowels go walking". Some cute you tube videos that explain these rules are: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bZhl6YcrxZQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7fb3Pdt8kxg

Non-Fiction Texts and Animal Book Reports

The month of February has had us busy! We started the month by discussing the differences between fiction and non-fiction texts and learning about the different features of non-fiction texts including table of contents, glossaries, indexes, text boxes and captions. Students are putting their learning into practice and are now using a non fiction text about an animal of their choice to write a mini-report on that animal's diet, habitat, life cycle, predators and appearance. Currently they are finishing up the research and jot note taking stage and will soon move into writing their first draft and editing their work.

Since it is also Black History Month, I have taken the opportunity to read a number of read-aloud stories about Rosa Parks, Henry "Box" Brown and Martin Luther King Jr. This has led to a number of very interesting and thought provoking questions and discussions in class.