Once Upon a Time...in Writer's Workshop

Wow, it's so hard to believe that we just finished our third week of school! Absolutely crazy! 

This week I wanted to give you a glimpse into our Writer's Workshop time.

 Every morning we have a block of time allotted to Writer's Workshop and I am not kidding when I tell you that the students get excited when I say the phrase,

 "It's Time for Writer's Workshop!" 

This past week during our writing time, we brainstormed all the things that the students knew a lot about - here's a peak at our brainstorming session:

As you can tell, these sweet darlings know a lot about a lot of things! I learned so much about the students from this activity, like what movies they like to watch, what video games they like to play, and the newest sports car craze.

After we brainstormed together as a whole group, we chose clip art or images to represent each of the different topics and ended up with this sweet Topics Chart that the students now have in their Writing Folder. 

Allowing the students to participate in creating their Topics Chart really helped give them ownership and an invested interest into Writer's Workshop. To finish up our week of writing, the students were allowed to choose a topic from their Topic Chart and write to their heart's content. 

Just look at these authors!

I tell you - I am absolutely spoiled by these second grade sweeties! 

They are top notch stuff. 

One last item I need to mention is Box Tops. Our class is collecting Box Tops and have our hearts set on winning the classroom competition for collecting the most Box Tops, so please send in your stash from those cereal boxes and apple juice containers. This coming Monday, August 25th, is when we will turn in this month's collection and we still have room in our collection bin for more. 

Thanks for supporting our amazing school!

Reading is OH, So Sweet!

This week was so much fun and again flew by fast as we began our first story in our reading curriculum - Henry and Mudge by Cynthia Rylant. We voted on which pet would be a good pet and then graphed our results and it turns out more of the students would prefer to have a cat as a pet rather than a dog (we even had a few students who voted on a snake as a pet...yikes!). Also during our reading time this past week, we began what we call Guided Reading Groups which are small groups of students who are led by a teacher or a teacher's aid to help with the five components of reading, which are:

• Phonemic Awareness - or in other words knowing our letters and their sounds
• Phonics - which is the blending of letters together to form words
• Vocabulary - knowing and being able to explain the meanings of words 
• Comprehension - understanding the sequence and story elements of a story, and
• Fluency - which is how smoothly and quickly a reader is able to read

Here are a few pics of our second grade sweeties participating in their Literacy Stations which follow their Guided Reading Groups:

And before I sign off for today, I just have to post a quick pick of the class getting serious about their reading in the computer lab. We are deep into Raz-Kids which is an amazing online reading program that helps students develop in all five areas of reading that I mentioned earlier. The students love this site - I mean they LOVE, LOVE it! Anyhow...we were in the computer lab this past Friday and it was so quiet that I just had to capture the moment because sometimes, let's face it, those moments of silence are rare. Check out these sweet readers, and you can check Raz-Kids by clicking on the link to the right of this blog page under "Sweet Stuff"!

     

Sweet Beginninngs

Our first day of school was filled with sorting our school supplies, getting to know each other, our first music and PE class, and lots of SWEET fun!