All About Clouds!

Here in Virginia, we teach a fairly comprehensive unit on weather in 2nd grade.  Our Standards of Learning (SOLs) include the water cycle, weather instruments, and dangerous storms, but clouds are not covered.  Being the rebel that I am, I teach clouds anyway!  My students love learning about different cloud types, what weather they bring, and what those Latin-derived names actually mean.  Well, maybe not that last part, but I throw it in for fun.

We start our cloud learning out with an old-fashioned K-W-L, which you can get here.  I find that most students have some background knowledge, even if it's as simple as the idea that clouds can form different shapes.  Then, to help students make sense out of names like cirrus and cumulus and cumulonimbus, we read a great book called The Man Who Named the Clouds. (You can find a link to it at the end of this post.) Some of it is too advanced for my kids, so I just pick out the relevant parts.

After that, we are ready for student research!  Students are divided into small groups, assigned a cloud type, and use QR codes to link to various websites to read and answer questions.  Each group is responsible for filling in the class chart with the information they learned and presenting it to the class.  I was pleasantly surprised by the addition of non-required illustrations!

Next, to get in some hands-on learning, students make sky cloud charts using cotton balls.  Because you can't teach clouds and not incorporate cotton balls, am I right?! I only allowed the students ten cotton balls each and they agonized over how to divvy them up.  Pretty good results overall.

Then, over the next couple of days, we do cloud sorting activities, cloud jigsaw puzzles, and interactive notes entries.  If you're interested in seeing more, head on over to my TpT store and check out my All About Clouds unit.

Last but not least, here are a few links to some great cloud books!

                            

 

Color Poem Amped Up

As I get into the thick of my writing program, I have been rewriting lessons and streamlining. Teaching in a dual language immersion program and having limited instructional times will prompt that! For a few years, I have done the traditional "color poem" that you can find all over the internet using the 5 senses. Last year I used it to practice telling more. Basically, this is the way it goes. You have your  kids pick a color to write about. They write a sentence for each sense. It might look like this:

Blue
Blue looks like water.
Blue sounds like quiet.
Blue feels like a blanket.
Blue tastes like a lollipop.
Blue smells warm.

While for some students this is a bit abstract and takes some thinking about how blue may smell, they usually pick up quickly on the idea. The result is something that a first grader might write (no offense first graders). But, it's a great jumping off point. Now, you will use it to have the kids expand on those ideas, to tell more.

Blue
Blue looks like water dripping off my nose.
Blue sounds like quiet when my sister goes to college.
Blue feels like a blanket wrapped around me.
Blue tastes like a lollipop sour and sweet.
Blue smells warm like my mom's blueberry cake.

This is where I stopped last year. We put them on cool paper that we decorated with each particular color. And we were very proud of them. Still are. They were great. They are a much better representation of what second graders can do than the first iteration.

This year, as I was planning, the little second grade doubter voice came into my head (you know... it's the voice of that child who remembers everything you've ever said and recalls it at just the moment that you are contradicting yourself). In a previous lesson, we had been discussing that writing is more interesting when we start our sentences with different words, not the same ones over and over again. Yup, busted. Well, I decided to fast-forward to a lesson that I usually do later in the year. I was hoping it would pay off if we could get a grasp on it this early in the year.

After we finished with the second iteration of the poem and without introduction, I pass out a note page to be glued into the sentence fluency section of our writing notebooks. It is a page that details different ways to begin sentences.

We read it together and I pose the question of why we glueing this in now. Usually the kids pick up on the connection to the color poem immediately. At this point we begin the transformation of the poem. I made up this organizer to help us do so. Each of the 5 sentences in the poem goes onto the organizer. Each in a different spot. Here is my final poem.

               Get this sheet on my TPT site.

Blue
Wrapped around me, blue feels like a blanket.
Dripping off my nose, blue looks like water.
Deliciously, blue tastes like a lollipop sour and sweet.
All at once, blue smells warm like my mom's blueberry cake.
Blue sounds like the quiet when my sister goes to college.

While, this was a difficult task at this point in the year, our poems ended up sounding great. The ideas of how to change up our sentence beginnings hit home and I look forward to working on it more in our upcoming writing units. Hope you can use it too! Let me know how it goes.

Amanda

End of the Year Fun

What is it about May?  March and April seem to drag along, and then - BAM!- May comes, and there aren’t enough hours in the school day.  The month is jam-packed with testing, field day, testing, science fairs, testing, and testing.  Did I mention all the testing that happens in May?  As a way to bring some fun into May, toward the end of the month I set up this balloon activity.  I found it here on Pinterest last year, and tried it out.  My kids loved it, and it was a great way to keep them motivated through the last day of school.  You can check out some of the activities my class does on our End of the Year Fun Pinterest board.

In my classroom, we do these activities the last 10 days of school, in the afternoons.  I don’t tell the kids anything about it in advance, so they are super-surprised the first morning all the balloons are hanging from the ceiling!  Each morning, we find that day’s balloon (I have them numbered), pop it, and read the activity.  My kids also know if they don’t behave, the activity can be taken away.  We have to maintain some control, right?  You can download these strips I put into the balloons here.   

Happy popping!

First Post!

I am convinced that the reason neither Molly nor myself has posted on our shiny new blog is because we are both being polite and waiting for the other to be the first. But, because we are so darned polite, this blog had the potential to never get kick-started. I am SURE that it has nothing to do with our very busy lives! Even though I don't have anything particularly brilliant to say (today), I figured I would post anyway. While, the blog will be a general second grade resource for other teachers and a place for me and my colleague, and friend, Molly to reflect, I have a particular soapbox to get up on today! I just got back last week from a conference in Albuquerque that I thought would be good to start with. It was called La Cosecha, and it was about all things related to dual language education. For me, a startlingly monolingual person, it was enlightening. The population in our school is fast becoming 50/50 English and Spanish speakers. Because I teach in second grade, the students come to me knowing English very well; our Kindergarten and first grade teachers do an amazing job. My Spanish speaking students often struggle with vocabulary and sometimes background knowledge, but are conversational and very functional English speakers. The "ah ha" moment for me at the conference was learning how important it is to have all children fluent in reading, writing, and speaking their first language in addition to their second. Many of my Spanish speaking students are not able to read or write in Spanish. I want that for them. On the other side of the coin, I want that for our English speakers too. So many others countries graduate students who are bilingual or even trilingual. They go out into the world with increased confidence and great job prospects. They don't expect that others will be able to speak their language, like I do when I travel. AND, it is so good for their brain development. My 4 year old son is slightly less monolingual than me because he has has a fantastic program in his preschool in Spanish. My wish for him is that he be as bilingual as possible when he graduates from college and hits the world/work force. My first step as a teacher is to try to get my very hesitant Spanish-speaking students to WANT to learn to read in Spanish.  I am also trying to build my knowledge of Spanish, which will be a slow process, but is exciting! On the way home from the conference in the Chicago airport, the 11 teachers from my school who attended the conference played the card game UNO, in Spanish. It was so much fun! We were probably torturing the people around us with our raucous behavior, but it was a ball. I decided to try the game on Friday with some small groups of students. We had a great time and both the Spanish and English kids loved it equally. To make it possible, I pre-taught a couple of phrases (lo siento and tramposo) that we practiced ahead of time, so that we could poke fun at each other while playing. I also had cards laid out around us with the words for the colors in Spanish. Most kids knew the words for the numbers 1-9, so I just had to teach them the number for zero. After that, we just began to play. Our Spanish-speakers taught us the words to say your turn, reverse, and skip while we were playing. It was a simple way (and was crazy fun) to start my process of reaching outside my comfort zone. I am not a Spanish-speaker (yet), but I can foster experiences to help kids realize the fun and benefit of being bilingual. It helped my students get those synapses firing while having fun! I'm looking forward to learning more and posting updates on my progress. Welcome to A Bird's Eye View!