2nd Grade Day of the Dead Writing

Please know - I love, love, love Halloween.

It is during fall. It is during football season. It is 4 days after my birthday. It is about candy and creativity - who does not love those two?

Historically, most of my ELL's have not enjoyed Halloween. It is not a holiday they celebrate, for a variety of reasons across a variety of cultures.

So I wanted to do a holiday celebration that would tie into our informational writing piece these past two weeks.

So el Dia de los Muertos is what we went with. Despite it's Halloween-esque appearance, it is quite different. Well, I say that, and in modern day cultures it has taken on an additional Halloween like tradition of dressing up.

Anyways, we read a Narrative and an Informational book about the holiday.

Here is our anchor chart. Yes, cemetery is spelled incorrectly. I fixed it, after the picture.

Our focus was writing facts and putting the facts in order.

To celebrate, we created name skeletons and sugar skulls.

Informational and start of opinion writing

We wrapped up Informational Writing two weeks ago.

The students completed the rubrics they created, along with a glow and a grow. We always display those with the completed piece.

We teachers complete our own version of the rubric that we use when we conference with students about their completed work.

Glows and grows in fifth grade look something like this:

LAST week, we completed opinion letters... in four days. 

I thought the locos were going to revolt. How dare us teachers ask them to write three to four paragraphs of their own opinion, edit, and publish the letter.. in four days :)

We wrote opinion letters to the President to tie into Social Studies and current events.

2nd Grade Pirate Writing Celebration

It's conference week... I was here till 8:30 last night in my last conference... I'm tired :)

Here are some long lost pictures of our Pirate Writing Celebration.

Since we are an ESOL classroom willed with ELL's, I make sure we make our sharing a to-do. I'm a big believer in writing having a purpose and that my locos should practice formally sharing English just like we practice informally.

The students are always super excited to share their writing and want to invite everyone possible. But then when it comes time to actually share, they get so nervous.

I have forgot to take one of the loco's pictures... oops!

We drank some shark's blood while we wrote our glows to our classmates.

A few pirate snacks to hold us over. Swords, Pirate Teeth, Fish Bait, Cannon Balls, Shark Baits, and Golden Nuggets.

Small Celebration + Freebie

So I've been absent from blogging for over a week... so much for that schedule, eh?

I've been busy for several reasons:

Back in September, my school was named a National Blue Ribbon School. 

As my principal said, it's nice to have an outside agency recognize the hard work being accomplished by the students, teachers, and community. But as teachers (ALL teachers), we do this every day not for recognition, but because it is the right thing for our kids.

This recognition has brought a lot of guests into our building recently, so I have been busy after school making up for that lost time. 

Funny enough, THREE of these guests looked around my room and recognized it from my blog. How funny is that??

I have also posted a Day of the Dead writing activity to TPT.

And if you use PicMonkey, did you know you can turn your pictures into a Day of the Dead sugar skull? I haven't had a chance to play around with it, but I will this week as my kids finish their name skeletons.

I made this halloween Long A sort long ago, in hopes of having several games to put together into a unit... Alas, I do not. So enjoy!

Classroom Visuals - CC and CRAFT

I have received a lot of questions about two things: Standards and CRAFT Board.

Well, I display my standard like this:

See them over there?

Since I have multiple grade levels in my room during the course of the day, I need to have them all visible. And of course, I want to make sure it look good while being visible.

Here are is the standard my second graders are working on. The blue things are our essential questions. My standard page might be up for a long period of time. My essential questions change every day or so. I use essential questions to focus my students' learning within the standard.

Here is the standard for 3rd grade. You can find them {HERE}

I have just attached them to a magnetic bar I have had since college. I think it is from IKEA. The magnetic dots are called, Magnetic Hold Its and I buy them by the truck load from amazon.

My CRAFT board looks like this:

It takes up the top half of my white board. The pocket charts are from the Target Dollar bins.

I keep the extra CAFE strategy cards under the pocket chart.

I also labelled the back of each strategy card to keep it all straight!

Sources:

5th Grade Informational Writing

We spiraled through Fictional Narratives in 5th grade and moved onto Informational Text.

We made our mantra, Short and Sweet. 

5th Grade this year has a standard of a SHORT informational text, so we decided to highlight a few aspects to be our focus and hit them hard so when we come back around to informational text, we can go more in depth with the other aspects.  

So we decided to focus on the organization, introduction, and conclusion of an informational text. Simple, right? :)

Process

We started each writing period with the review a few graphic features. Most of these are a review for our students because they are also taught in our old standards (Georgia Performance Standards) throughout the previous grades.

Then used model texts or newspapers to find examples of each text feature to create an anchor chart. I think it look pretty good, don't you? My handwriting needs some improvement though. Sigh.

For each mini lesson, we addressed the focus for the day.

First, we had the students choose their aspect of our topic they wanted to research (Animals!)

Then (the next day) we focused on asking BIG questions.

Then, we researched answers to the questions. For this project, sourcing was limited to title and author (this student forgot the title of this book, oops!).

Then the students worked on turning their BIG questions into topic sentences and adding their facts to create body paragraphs.

Next came working on the introduction and conclusion.

Once that was complete, we turned to revising and editing using our Rainbow Editing chart.

So last week students worked on publishing and creating the expected THREE graphic features from our anchor chart.

My collaborator and I doing writing conferences during the work period. Students can request a conference immediately at the start of the work period, but other then that, we each have a list for the day that we meet with. I usually have a small group of ELL and non-ELL students around me during writing conferences, so my list always a little smaller.

Hope this helped to answer some questions! How are y'all handling writing conferences?

Sources:

This is the Colorful Editing Bookmark that my locos use during writing editing.

This anchor chart was the inspiration for ours. I found it on - GASP - Pinterest. The original source is from Julie at:

We also used these Non-Fiction Text Feature Posters from Primary Punch. I love them, simple and effective.