Publishing Party!!!

Our class has spent the last 20 school days learning all about the structure of Writing Workshop.  We have been focusing on writing narratives - telling a true story of one moment in our lives.  Skills we have learned include: generating ideas, writing good leads and endings, having a beginning, middle, and end, using end punctuation, and making our writing more interesting by adding details and dialogue.

We also went through the process of revising and editing.  Today our class had a Publishing Party!  Students had the opportunity to self-assess their work, and made note of what they can do well as a writer and what they were able to do to improve their writing by comparing "before" and "after" revision pieces of their work.

We then put our work on display for the whole class to enjoy.  We had an opportunity to report out what kinds of things we noticed in others' writing that we would like to try in our own writing.

What's a party without party favors?!?  You will see our students sporting stretchy band bracelets - because "writing stretches your learning"!

Now that we have been through the entire process, we are going to start one more unit on narrative writing on Monday.  It is so exciting to watch second graders grow as writers!

Cooperative Learning

What kinds of things is your child exploring in second grade so far?

We have been busy learning how to work with a partner or small group in ways that enhance our learning.  We all share the responsibilities of both teacher and learner as we work together to explore new ideas.  This class has such great ways of thinking!  It's exciting to see how they share their thoughts and support each other while learning new things!

Here are a few pictures to give you an idea of some of the activities we have been doing:

Using math cubes to help with adding and subtracting story problems.

Creating compound words and dividing words into syllables.

Playing math games like "Make 10"

Students are learning that being able to work with others, listening to different ideas, and explaining your thinking with evidence are important parts of the learning process.  

Don't forget that we have one more session of NWEA testing on Tuesday, September 23.