Reading and Writing All Day Long

This week is an amazing example of how we read and write all day long in 2nd grade. We have incorporated Social Studies and Science into our literacy time, so now the only time kids aren't reading a book or writing about their learning is when we are doing math. Even during math we have journals that they write in though, so it really is an all day thing!

In Social Studies we have started learning about different communities. The students read through my community books and pulled out what they noticed as they read through them.

We will be starting up our inquiry projects soon, so students needed to come up with questions. A lot of their questions were "easy answers" or yes/no, so we did a quick lesson on thick and thin questions.

As part of our spelling we are putting key words up onto the word wall. Students are then supposed to use these words when they are writing similar words (thump, stump, trumpet).

Please excuse the sloppy anchor chart, we made it together and I haven't copied our nice one to put up on the wall yet!

Sharing their weekend news. We practiced giving compliments about writing.

Sharing their weekend news. We practiced giving compliments about writing.

Reading groups. We started our theme readers and practiced reading along with our partner to help if they said the wrong word or got stuck on a word.

One of the math games we learned this week was Beat the Calculator. Students took turns being the calculator, the brain, and the caller. We learned from this game that it is usually quicker to use our brain and not rely on the calculator! This has really been helpful as we have started learning our addition strategies +1, doubles, and +9 facts.

These girls are working on their math journals. We journal each day in math so that the teacher can see what each child did during math game time.

 In literacy our focus vocabulary was community. We researched what we thought was in each community. We learned that each community needs places for people to live, work, play, and solve problems. The kids worked in groups to plan and create a community.