Secret Ways : Character Building

Having any holiday fun in the classroom yet?  This is my favorite time of year, but boy can it turn stressful real quick!  There's so much to do at home and school that it can be so overwhelming... am I right?!  But most days teachers put their big girl/boy pants on and still provide that holiday happiness for their kiddos.  Fake it 'til ya make it, is what I always say!

Today the second graders became Turkey Fact Trackers.  If I'm going to be real honest I couldn't think of anything better, ha!  I also couldn't find any cute Thanksgiving goodies because everything Christmas has already flooded the aisles!  So, I just glued a little feather and googly eye to the end of a craft stick :)

One of the skills that second graders are working on this week is writing a summary.  This can be so difficult for kids if they have never learned summary writing strategies.  So often, we just say "summarize the story" and expect our kids to know what to do.  We will have students who write pages upon pages about the book OR we will have students who say "The book was about a girl."  We've got to find a happy medium, but that comes with a lot of modeling and practice.

Here's what I did today.  The students had already listened to the story, "Grace for President."  So, we started with a retell of the story.  We went through the steps to writing a summary:  Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then" together.  We talked a lot about how our summary was going to retell the story without giving every little detail away.  We also discussed the importance of writing a summary in sequential order.  I used these posters to help out.  You can grab those HERE!

As we were discussing, we wrote the summary on our Future Voter ribbons.  These were initially created for grammar, but I adapted them for writing a summary.

We did this as a whole group so that students would take their time on each step.  We constantly went back and reread our summary piece by piece so that we could make sure we were on the right track. 

Afterwards I continued working with small groups on writing a summary.  I read the story, "When Penny Met POTUS" to get us started.  Then I told the students that were were going to build a summary snack piece by piece if they could identify each part of the summary.  I had five bags labeled SOMEBODY, WANTED, BUT, SO, THEN.  Inside of the bags I place five strips of paper.  Four of the strips contained false information while 1 strip had the correct summary portion on it!

 Students grabbed the strips out of the bag one at a time and shared it with the group.  If it wasn't correct, we placed it back in the bag.  If it was the correct piece of our summary, we kept it out of the bag. 

As we went through each piece of the summary, the students were able to build their summary snack.  I had five ingredients for the five parts of our summary.  I just quickly gave each student a scoop of the ingredient and we layered them one on top of the other.

Once we were finished choosing our parts of the summary and making our summary snack, we were able to indulge in the cup of deliciousness!

AND we had a complete summary!

You can grab the summary freebies HERE!  The future voter ribbon came from Rooted in Reading:  Grace For President.  I just made five strips.  You can always just cut five pieces of paper and the students can label them Somebody Wanted But So Then!

Today was one of my favorite read-aloud days!  We read I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll.  If you don't have the book, you can see a really great read-aloud on Storyline Online!

We discussed the difference in character traits and character feelings/emotions.  I was a little worried about how this would go over, but the kids did a really great job sorting the sticky notes inbetween the two categories.  I had written character traits and feelings/emotions about the main character, Ethan, on sticky notes in advance.  This helped keep our time focused and smooth-moving!  We agreed that a couple of the sticky notes could fall in either category.  

After reading the story and discussing the difference in character traits and feelings/emotions (I kept this very simple- traits:  how a character is, their personality and feelings/emotions:  describe how a character feels at a certain time and can be temporary) we broke into small groups.  I had students work together to create one of the monsters from the book.  Working in partners on crafts really help things move quick!  Two people cutting speeds things up tremendously!  I needed a bag for each monster (excluding Gabe) so we just glued the monster onto a paper bag!

Then we went stirring around for character traits in eyeball soup!  I put a spider web package, which is basically cotton balls, and eyeball bouncy balls into a cauldron.  Then, I folded up character traits and put those in between the layers.  Students had to scoop out a piece of paper and unfold it for all of us to see.

We decided which character it belonged to and placed it in their bag.

  

After we all had a turn, we took out the character traits and made sure that we placed them with the correct monster.

If we had any questions, we looked back into the book for textual evidence!  You can grab the character traits HERE.  If nothing else, you could sort on a pocket chart :)

Let me tell you... this entire activity was a HIT!  They loved making their monster bags (from October RIR) with a partner.  They definitely had a blast with the eyeball soup.  AND let me tell ya... they were anticipating taking home an eyeball all day long, ha!  Most importantly, they thoroughly enjoyed the book and learning more about the monsters.

With the election coming up, there are so many ways that we can incorporate fun activities into our reading or social studies block without even getting too political with our students.  Our little ones don't need to know all of the details just yet, but introducing them to the election process is definitely important.

Here are some of my favorite election books.  They are just right for our little learners!

Grace for President, When Penny Met POTUS, If I Ran for President, If I Were President, Duck for President, Madame President, My Teacher for President, Monster Needs Your Vote

One way to introduce the election process is by hosting a little mock election in your classroom.  I am a sucker for Oreos.  I could eat a whole box in no time.  Chocolate or Golden you ask?  I don't discriminate... I love them both!  Give me chocolate with a glass of milk or 10 golden Oreos.  I will eat them all up!

Students will sample each cookie and decide which they like the best.  You could even have them make little campaign posters if you so wish!  Then, students vote on their favorite cookie.  This ballot freebie can be found HERE!  

If you want to go deeper with your election studies, Katie and I have created a one-week Rooted in Reading that would be perfect during November.  BUT, it can also be used when studying about presidents if you don't have time right now.  It goes along Grace for President by Kelly S. DiPucchio.

We've already seen some teacher's get started with this unit!  Look how beautiful this Presidential wall is in 3rdGradeLove's classroom!

Digging deep into a text is always a key feature of RIR, whether we are having fun with a theme or not!  We also included a Non-Fiction reader about the President's job.

Of course we wanted to incorporate all of the elements of Rooted in Reading, so we also included grammar for the week.  It is more of a review week:  proper nouns, parts of speech, adjectives, and types of sentences.

We hope you enjoy the freebie and reading Grace for President!

This week second graders are reading Stellaluna and learning about bats.  Today, we focused on nonfiction books and learning information about bats.  We started off with a little bat chart and read-aloud.  We definitely found out some new information!

After our read aloud we discussed the difference between facts and opinions.  I gave sentences about bats to each student.  They came up, read the sentence to the class, and we decided if it was a fact or opinion!

After our mini-lesson, I gave each student a paragraph about bats, blue highlighter, yellow highlighter, and eyeball rings (found at Kroger).  I told the students that the rings were our Fact Finding Friends and they were going to help us distinguish between facts and opinions in the paragraph.  We went through the sentences together, highlighting the facts yellow and the opinions blue.  You can find these fact and opinion freebies HERE!

Afterwards, we made a simple little bat and used sticky notes to represent our learning.  The students wrote an opinion about bats on the blue star sticky note, and a fact on the yellow!  Keeping these the same color as their highlighters really helped them distinguish between the two!  This bat craft is in October's Rooted in Reading :)

We didn't get to this yet, but it's all ready for later in the week.  This little experiment comes from Holly Ehle.  Here's how it works...

Bats use their sense of smell to locate their young.  You get different flavors/scents and put them on cotton balls.  Pass them out randomly to students (not telling them which is which).  They walk around smelling the cotton balls of their classmates.  If they find their bat family, they stick together until all of their members have been found.  Then you can try and guess who has which scent!  I bought the bats to wear around their wrists so they can really act like bats :)))

It was a really fun day jam-packed with lots of fact finding!  This is one of my favorite times of the year in the classroom!!