Sharing our Books

We are sharing our books all over EVCS!  On Wednesday we shared them with family in the morning. In the afternoon we shared our books with Leslie and Lenore's second grade class.  Today we read them to our Reading Buddies in Georga's Pre-K.  Lots of people are learning from us!

Dioramas and Published Nonfiction Books

It was wonderful to see so many families this week!  Our publishing share was packed with parents and siblings in the morning and then with other second graders in the afternoon.  It was a great time to take pride in our work and share what we've learned.

We will be sharing our books with our reading buddies today and then with more EVCS friends during January - but dioramas have already been sent home.  The students worked so hard on these amazing additions to their writing projects.  We have been having 1-on-1 conferences following this unit to talk about what we learned, what we liked, what we didn't like, and how we want to grow as writers.  Wow, did we learn a lot!

The Natural History Museum

Barclay's Center

The Statue of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry

The Met

The New York Science Center

The Statue of Liberty

Four Freedoms Park

Coney Island

Union Square

The Statue of Liberty

The Empire State Building

The Empire State Building

The Statue of Liberty

The Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island

The Statue of Liberty

Yankee Stadium

The Intrepid

Coney Island

The Met

Times Square

Publishing Share and the Festival of Lights

Next Wednesday (December 18th) is a very exciting day in our class!

From 8:30-9:15 we will be having a publishing share of our published research books and our dioramas!  Please come check out the great work our students have been doing over the past few weeks.

Then, follow us downstairs to the auditorium for the 9:30 start time of the Festival of Lights!  The whole school will be performing, singing, and gathering together for a wonderful EVCS tradition.

Hope to see you then!

This Machine Kills Fascists

We finished our great study of Woody Guthrie today with Bradley!  We made songbooks throughout the semester with the songs we've been studying.  Check them out!  You can sing along at home using the books, since we also received CDs of Woody Guthrie songs today.  We also recorded ourselves singing "This Land is Your Land" today.  Once it's ready, I'll certainly share it.  Enjoy the music at home!

A student illustrates the dust bowl

We had to put our songs in order

We made table of contents

We wrote and drew covers for our books

Writing Conferences

As we continue publishing, we're beginning to reflect on our work.  What was easy for us?  What was difficult for us?  How do we want to grow and change as a writer throughout the next 6 months in second grade?

This week, we will be having one-on-one reflective conferences.  Each student has been asked to select a day and time that they would like to meet during.  They also were asked to write down what they want to reflect on with me.  Some of us knew right away what we want to work on - from spelling to using more effective words, from making more effective captions to handwriting, we're beginning to think about what we want to work on.

During these conferences, we'll create a plan for 2014.  How can I help them?  How can their peers help them?  How can they help themselves?  We want to be more self-directed, so learning about resources and tools we can use to improve in these areas will help us help ourselves even more.  I'm looking forward to these meetings!

More diorama work

We are still working on our dioramas.  Today we become more self-directed in our work and began using lots of different materials based on our needs.  We'll be working a little bit each day until December 17th - the day before our big share!

The dreaded Snuzzlewump!

On Wednesday, we received an urgent message from Princess Funer in the Land of Centimeter:

“Help! The dreaded Snuzzlewump has returned to my kingdom!  He smashed Pim’s house!  He trampled the King’s garden!  And worse yet – he broke all of our rulers!  How will we measure now?”

- Princess Funer

We immediately sprang into action!  First, we needed to learn more about this terrible creature, the Snuzzlewump.

We learned that the princess needed to learn how large three of the now-destroyed items in her kingdom were so that she could rebuild them.  She needed to know how tall the pillars of her castle were, how wide the roof of Pim's house was, and how wide the roller skating rink was.  Luckily for us, we had those exact things in our classroom:  We just called them markers, post-it notes, and notebooks, however!

Our rulers, though, were broken.  None of them started at 0!  And that was one of our rules when measuring!  This seemed tough...and like something that might take more than one day.  Yesterday, we started to measure.  It was hard!  We were finding things like "32 cm for a post-it note" which we knew couldn't be right.  But if it wasn't right, why was the end of the post-it note at the 32 mark?  

Yesterday, we kept digging into this problem.  We used a large-scale "ruler" (our number line) to measure objects and found that they didn't change in length whether we held then starting at 0 or starting at another number.  A paper that was 9 units when held from 0 to 9 was also 9 units when it was held from 10 to 19!  We kept working on this for a while and suddenly, it clicked!  We could do this!  We just had to find the number of spaces between the start and end numbers!  We were just finding the difference between the two numbers!  We were on a roll!  Stay tuned as we continue our exploration into measurement.

Dioramas!

This student needs sky above and water
below for his diorama about the
Intrepid Museum

Today we began our dioramas in Social Studies!  Our dioramas will show our New York City landmarks that we've been researching and learning about in writing.  From the Statue of Liberty to Times Square, from Four Freedoms Park to Coney Island, we've been learning a lot about the city around us.  Now we get to show the city around us!

We began by planning our dioramas.  We're following this "How To" writing to complete the process.  Today, we planned the background of our dioramas and some of us even began to sketch and paint the background.  Over the next 2 weeks we'll be hard at work finishing our projects to share with our writing!

Writing Clinics

Today we began the publishing process for our Informational books.  As independent writers, we are working to learn our strengths, weaknesses, and needs.  While we all know how to write informational all-about books based on many whole-class lessons, group lessons, repeated exposures to mentor texts, and extensive readings of nonfiction books throughout the past weeks, today we began holding writing clinics.

Clinics are targeted sessions for groups of kids to brainstorm together and get feedback on areas they are most struggling with.  Students self-select these clinics based on their needs and come to both gain feedback and to give feedback.  Today, three clinics were held during our Writing Workshop time.  Students signed up for zero, one, two, or three throughout the 45 minute block of time.

Our first clinic was called "Catchy Chapter Titles".  Students who felt that their chapter titles did not hook the reader, came with their initial ideas and shared them with the group.  They received feedback on their ideas and everyone left with titles they thought both explained their chapters well while still be catchy.  Some students were even encouraged by others to keep their original chapter titles.

Our second clinic was called "Which Words to Bold?".  In this clinic, students both asked each other where words should be bolded (as in, were most likely unknown words to an uninformed reader) and also what definitions to include in their glossary for some bolded words.  Figuring out an exact definition for words like "liberty" or "team" were tricky, but we eventually helped each other out.  Once we used a great writing tool too - the dictionary!

Our final clinic today was called "Fun Facts and Captions".  In this clinic, students shared facts they had liked about their topics that didn't seem to fit into their chapters.  They also asked for feedback on picture ideas or possible captions for their informational pictures.  Again, everyone left knowing how to continue.

Being a self-directed writer is difficult.  There is a lot to keep track of, a lot to organize, and a lot to process as we create multi-page books.  Learning to identify our needs as a learner, however, is the hardest thing of all.  Today we were responsible, self-directed writers.  Stay tuned for more!

Twirlers

Today your child came home with a new spinning item from our science work -- a twirler!  A twirler is different from our other spinners - it doesn't require the axis to be balanced in one place.  Our tops had to stay balanced on a flat surface.  Our zoomers had to be balanced on strings pulled tight by our thumbs.  Our twirlers, however, flew up into the air!

Today we experimented with different ways to give the twirler the force required to move.  We pulled and pushed, we gave a lot of force and a little, we change the direction of the force -- and so much more!  We quickly learned that the more force we gave the twirler, the further it went.  We also noticed that a pulling force ended in a collision between the twirler and our faces, while a pushing force really got it going.  On Thursday we'll start writing our thoughts about spinning -- since next week we'll start studying the motion of rolling!

Above is a twirler twirling through the air in our school yard

Zoomers

Today, your child came home with a zoomer.  We have been learning about the motion of spinning in our science program for the past few weeks.  Here's a video from another school of a student using a zoomer and talking about it.

Click Here for School Tube Video

Have your child show you how it works.  It still spins like our tops, but this time it requires the force of pulling, rather than the force of pushing to get it moving!  We first made zoomers out of plastic (which we found was easier to get zooming) but then made them today with lighter-weight cardboard that we could decorate.  We saw our drawings change when it zoomed, much like our drawings changed on our tops.  Enjoy!

How to make your Zoomer go: