Favorite First Week Read Alouds!

Inferencing Bottles

We talk a lot about making inferences in second grade so I decided to make some inference bottles.  I spray painted glass lemonade bottles black and spray painted the lids gold and then used a sharpie to write the numbers 1-4 on the top.  I put different things in each bottle.  In one I put paper clips, in another I put pens, in the third I put water and in the last one I put plastic coins (all things found in my classroom). 

We talked about what an inference is and about how we don't just make a random guess but we use the information and clues we have to make a decision about something. 

I gave each table a recording sheet where they had to write down each bottle number, their inference of what was in the bottle, and three reasons for their inference.  I started each table with a bottle and then when they had made their inferences we rotated the bottles so that each table go to make an inference for each bottle. 

They did surprisingly well!  And they came up with great reasons for the inference they had made!

The students loved this activity and it was a great way to reinforce that we can't make random guesses, that we have to have reasons when we are making an inference. 

Here are some pictures of the before and after of the bottles:

 

Question Cubes and Prompt Sticks

I had these great dice from the dollar store. I got two for a dollar.  I decided that I would use some of them as question cubes for Guided Reading.  I color coded them so that it would be easy for me to know which set to use.  The green ones are for my students who are reading bellow grade level.  The blue ones are for my students reading on or above level and the red ones are for non fiction books.  I love that they are made out of foam because they won't make too much noise when the students roll them on the table. These could be good for group discussion at the end of Guided Reading or it could be fun for the students to roll to determine what they will write about in their Guided Reading response journals. 

Dice, the questions, scissors, and a whole bunch of mod podge was all I needed for this project.  And some t.v. shows to watch while making them of course. 

Grab my questions for FREE HERE!

Another thing that I worked on today was a journal prompt jar.  I started with the prompts last year but then the project didn't get finished in time for school and they just sat around. If you are ever stuck on journal prompts I LOVE looking at this website for ideas.   

Now when I hear the oh so common "I don't know what to write about", I can simply reply "Go pick a journal stick."

Reading Bingo

I have seen a lot of different reading bingo boards on Pinterest.  I've been wanting to make one of my own for quite some time now.  Now that it's summer, I did!  One thing that I didn't like about some of the reading bingos that I saw was that they were fun and motivational for kids, but they didn't emphasize reading with a parent.  Being a second grade teacher I am constantly emphasizing the importance of parents reading with their children.  Students can sound like they are reading great but they may be making up words or skipping words unbeknownst to whoever is listening if they are not following along with them.  Here is my reading bingo that involves lots of reading with parents!  

Grab a free coy HERE!

   

I'm excited to share this with parents in the fall as a way for them to help their children to be motivated about doing their home reading each night.  This would also be great to send home at the end of the school year to keep kids motivated to read through the summer. 

Dr. Seuss Birthday Celebration

Theodor Seuss Geisel (aka Dr.Seuss) was born on March 2nd 1904.  We will be celebrating his birthday in school this up coming Friday!  Last year I did not do too much for Dr. Seuss's birthday, so I am excited to be celebrating with my kiddos this year!  We will be having a read-a-thon, but since we all know that most Second Graders do not have the capability of sitting and reading for extended periods of time without becoming restless (especially when 2/3 of your class is boys), I am mixing some other things in.  Here are some of the things we will be doing:

When the kids come in in the morning I am going to have a bookmark on their desk with a Dr. Seuss quote on it.  They will get to decorate it or color it however they would like.  My roommate did this last year with her class and I thought it as a great idea.  The bookmark I came up with is very simple, it can be downloaded HERE if you would like a copy:

Of course the students will be bringing pillows and blankets and any books from home that they would like to read during our read-a-thon.

My kids LOVE buddy reading this year.  They are always asking if they can buddy read.  I will allot some of our read-a-thon time to reading alone an some of the time to buddy reading.   

I will be reading some Dr. Seuss stories to them from the books pictured above.  Since one of their favorite tings is laying down during read aloud (I allow them to when they have been really good all day)  maybe I will let hem lie down with their pillows and blankets and listen. 

I have also found some short videos of some of Dr. Seuss's books on YouTube.  We might watch one or two of these:

There are some interviews done by Reading Rockets with Audrey Geisel (Dr Seuss's wife) They are broken up into short 1-2 minute segments.  Some of them could be fun to show to the class.  My favorite is "I've Got It"  It talks a little bit about the process that Dr. Seuss went through as he wrote.  HERE is a link to the interviews

I think it would be fun to have the students interview each other about their favorite Dr. Seuss books.  This way, beyond just reading, they will be thinking about the books a little bit.  They will be held accountable for comprehension.  Each child will fill out the interview sheet for their Favorite Dr. Seuss book.  They will then get with a partner and they will ask each other the questions and respond to them.

This can also be downloaded for free by clicking the link above for the bookmarks. 

I found a FREE app for my iPad that lets you record your voice.  You can then play it back,e-mail it, save it, convert it to an MP4 file etc.  I think it would be great to have the kids practice reading a Dr. Seuss book or a portion of it for fluency.  After they have read through it a few times I can record it and then play it back for them so that they can hear how they are doing with speed, accuracy, and expression.  

I will pull individuals (lower readers) and groups of kids (grade level or higher) to the Guided Reading table and do this with them during our read-a-thon time.  I will probably pull back the kids who are seeming a little restless first. 

If you would like to download the app an play around with it it is called Voice Record Pro.  Here is a picture and description.

Happy Birthday Dr. Seuss!  Thank you for giving us a reason to celebrate literacy and reading!

 

Animated Shorts are Great!

Yes. This is the third blog post of the night.  The truth of the matter is that I have thought about blogging a lot in the past month, but have not had the time to do so.  I have a little bit of time tonight, so I am playing catch-up.

Animated Short Film quite often make their way onto the Education page on Pinterest.  I was teaching about making inferences last week and decided that it would be the perfect time to use one of those short films I had pinned. 
We ended up watching two.  A longer one and a shorter one.  I played the film and would pause it at certain spots and have the students make an inference of what they thought would happen next (based on the context clues and what they had seen thus far).  Once again, almost every kid had their hand raised and wanted to participate. As a teacher, I LOVE it when that happens.  It means I have done a good job of getting the students engaged. 

Here are some short films that are good for teaching about inferences:

Happy President's Day Weekend!

Dialogue!

Wow. It has been WAY TOO LONG since I have blogged.  The holidays all the way from October to December were quite busy.  I did a lot of the same projects that I blogged about last year.

This past week I taught my class about dialogue.  I thought I would share some of the things we did.  I started off by talking about what dialogue was.  Following that i went through a Prezi that I made about dialogue (If you are not a Prezi user, you should be.  I love it SO much more than PowerPoint.  One of the best things is that it is easy to insert a YouTube video into a Prezi presentation and there are no adds on it).

We started with the "First Day of School" clip from the movie Finding Nemo.
We talked about how it is pretty easy to determine who is speaking when we are watching a movie.

Then we looked at the "bread in the toaster" comic from Calvin and Hobbes. 
We talked about how we could determine who as talking in the comic.

After that I showed the students a couple of pages from a book that I had recently read to them.  We talked about how you could tell when a character was talking by looking for quotation marks.  I read the pages without paying attention to the quotation marks and then again with paying attention to them.  I had the students explain to me which way they liked better and why.

After that we looked at one more clip from the read aloud book that I am currently reading.  We talked about telling sentences and talking sentences and tried to determine which sentences were telling ones and which ones were talking.

We practiced writing dialogue by writing back and forth with a partner on a whiteboard.  I had the students make sure that they were using quotation marks and practicing that as they did this activity.

Next we rolled two of these dice (the ones that have characters listed on them) to help us come up with some different combinations of characters that we could write a dialogue between.  The kids loved rolling the dice (I picked up the wooden blocks at Hobby Lobby for 99 cents a piece and then painted them and wrote on them).  I wrote the combinations up on the board to get them thinking, but let them know that they could write a dialogue between any two people or characters they wanted.

The final thing I had my students do was to write a dialogue between two people or characters on a piece of lined paper.  They then had to glue the dialogue onto a piece of construction paper and build a story around it.  This first one is my example.  Below it are some of the ones my kiddos did, most of them did a pretty good job.

 (This is a pretty realistic conversation that happens almost daily with this student. haha)

Life is good in Second Grade!  Hopefully I will post more in the near future!

Miss Paul

Some More Read Aloud Books

It has been forever! My second graders have been keeping me busy, but I promise that there will be some more posts in the near future.  We are working on an informational writing unit on pumpkins right now and I can't wait to share all about it at the end of the week!

Until then...this is my FAVORITE read aloud book:

There are so many great voices in the book!  The crazy kids and the hysterical moms when their kids disappear, it is just so much fun to read!  I had kids that were sad every day when we had to stop reading.  At the end when I asked the students if they liked the book I got a resounding YES!

Right now we are reading this book:

I was a little worried just because the book is about dolls in a doll house and my class is made up of 17 boys and 11 girls.  There is a little bit of mystery in the story though so I figured that might keep the boys interest.  So far so good, even my boys are liking it : )



Beginning of the Year Read Alouds

Are there any other exhausted teachers out there?  I think I have the best job in the world, I am so lucky to spend my days with 27 amazing second graders and to have the opportunity to teach them. 

Who doesn't love a job where you get things like this?

One of my favorite parts of the day is Read Aloud!  I absolutely LOVE to read to my kids.  It's a time where I don't have to worry about using proximity so that a student will stop fiddling with a pencil during a lesson.  I don't have to tell the whole class that I love how "suzzie" has nothing in her hands,is folding her arms, and looking at me (so that the rest of the class will comply).  I don't have to give out tickets or warm fuzzies (even thought those are good things and it is a pleasure to give them to the students who are being good).  I don't have to give warnings or take away tickets.  I get to read and my kids sit quietly, listen, smile and laugh.  Read Aloud is always something to look forward to right at the end of the day before we go home : )  

The first book I read to my class this year was The Hundred Dresses.  It is a short book and we read it in just under a week.  I didn't read it last year, but I love the message in it and decided that it would be good for the beginning of the year this year.  The book gave us the opportunity to talk about the importance of being kind to everybody and also what we should do if we see bullying.  I think that most of my kids enjoyed the book.  One of my boys even said "Yeah, that was a really good book."

Since our first book was a little more on the serious side I decided that we needed a fun book for our next read aloud book.  I decided on The Twits by Roald Dahl.  I read this book last year and my kids loved it!  I love this book because there is great voice.  The book really allows yo to model for the kids how to read with expression.  You know you have chosen a good book when the you tell the class that we will be stopping or today and they all say "awwww".  To those classes next to me who may have heard me yelling or speaking very loudly, I apologize. We were just having a grand old time reading and listening to The Twits!  

Some of my other favorite read alouds include: Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Summer of the Monkeys, and Boxcar Children Books

I am also excited to read Flat Stanley with my class this year and to do the project that goes with it. 

What are some of your favorite read aloud books?

Free Emergency Sub Plans

A while back I saw the idea of emergency sub plans that revolve around a book and LOVED it!  This past year the sick days I had to get subs for were due to pink eye (which my students so kindly gave me) and laryngitis, both for which I had no problem writing sub plans.  Although I hope that I will be healthy and never have to use emergency sub plans I figure I would rather be safe than sorry and someday I may be extremely thankful to myself. 

I went to Barnes and Noble and found these great book! They were $6.00 a piece, and since I couldn't decide which one I liked better, I bought both : )

Using the stories in the book I came up with activities for reading, writing, math, and science.  I also came up with a list of extra activities just in case there is time to kill.  There is more than enough for one day!  The possibilities are endless with these books, but this is what I came up with for now.  Here are the EMERGENCY SUB PLANS

I hope that these will come in handy for someone! Let me know what you think!

Summer Reading Incentive

This year I have been an intern at my school which means that the past couple of months have involved a lot of resume writing and applying for jobs. Last minute a spot opened up at my school in Second grade (which is where I am this year). I interviewed and today my principal offered me the job! I am SO EXCITED to be staying at my school and to get to teach second grade again next year! On another note,wouldn't it be nice if every good little boy and girl went off for summer vacation and read every day? It would be nice, but it is hardly a reality. A week or so ago I came up with the idea of a summer reading incentive for my current students. The Olympics coming up this summer gave me a little inspiration. I titled the program "Go for the Gold". I made up a chart where students can bubble in a circle for every 20 minutes they read. At 500 minutes they reach bronze, at 1000 minutes they reach silver, and at 1500 minutes (25 hours) they reach gold. If students fill out their chart over the summer and have it signed by a parent they can bring it back to me at the beginning of next school year and get their corresponding prize. The prizes will be simple and inexpensive, but incentive to read none the less. I think my kids will be excited about it, I know I am! Here is what my chart looks like:

I would be happy to e-mail it to anyone interested in having a copy : )