Informing Others

As part of our Non-Fiction unit, students explored books to recognize non-fiction conventions (labels, captions, index, etc.) as well as learn the difference between a sorted and narrative non-fiction text. Today students participated in a scavenger hunt that allowed them to explore the features of a non-fiction text as well as to help students recognize if they know where to find the features in the book.

One of our Second Grade Writing Standards states that students will be able to communicate big ideas, insights or theories that have been elaborated on or illustrated through facts, details, quotations, statistics and information. To work towards this standard, we have begun researching our topics for report writing. Students have chosen topics that they know little about and are in the process of organizing factual information they have found on their topic. Students will be allowed to search on safe sites such as the ones added to the "Student Links" on the right side of our blog.

*SNAPS*

We ended our Poetry unit by sharing our published pieces at our very own Poetry Cafe. Students sipped on "coffee" (chocolate milk) and shared their poems under a spotlight while their friends celebrated their work through snapping.



Below is a video that highlights a few of our poems:

Untitled from Julia Lewis on Vimeo.

Holiday Play Pictures

Idioms are "a Piece of Cake"

Butterflies in My Stomach and Other School Hazards by Serge Bloch is the story of one boy's experience as he moves through the day on his first day of school. The story is illustrated with idiom expressions. An idiom is an expression used by a specific group of people where the meaning is only understood by common usage (ex: "You woke up on the wrong side of the bed," " "the cat is out of the bag," or "the test was a piece of cake") As a class, we explored idioms and the expressions used in this book. Students had to choose one of the idioms and illustrate the idiom literally and figuratively as well as interpret the meaning.

We are currently in our Poetry unit in Writers Workshop. Students had to take the idiom chosen previously and incorporate it into a poem. Check out our poems on the clips outside our classroom! You can also get a closer look at our idiom work on our Standards Based Bulletin Board this month.