Last spring, a student gave me a little stuffed animal otter, which my class named Eddie. A sudden brainstorm hit me and I decided to use Eddie as a tool for classroom management. "Eddie the otter enjoys spending time with quiet students," I announced one morning, and thus began the morning routine of giving him to a different child each day to keep at their desk, as long as that student remained quiet and followed directions. If a child became too talkative or showed any form of misbehavior, our fuzzy friend was promptly taken away and placed back on the teacher's desk, or handed to another student. Eddie truly has become an integral member of the Room 17 community. I know this because, if I ever forget to give him to a student, someone in the class will inevitably ask, "Who gets Eddie today?" This year, I've been able to expand Eddie's involvement in the classroom into the realm of writing. He has become Room 17's favorite writing topic. We started off by developing his character with a circle map, with me modeling my own: After thinking of ideas to describe Eddie, we then began regular writing sessions about Eddie in the form of journal entries. We call them The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter. I gather the class on the carpet, and explain to them about diaries and journals, and the format of a diary entry with a date, greeting, and closing. On chart paper, I do a form of interactive writing with the children, eliciting ideas for sentences we could write from Eddie's point of view, as if he were actually writing in his own diary. I even call on students to come up and write words or add punctuation themselves to a sentence or paragraph, involving them directly and physically with the writing. I encourage the students to think like powerful writers, using vivid and concrete details to describe Eddie's day. Here are a couple samples: As independent writing practice, I occasionally have the class copy a diary entry and illustrate it. They've also written their own individual entries "by Eddie" in their own writing journals, and each one is so different! We've only done five or so entries for Eddie as a class thus far. I'm very curious to see where The Chronicles of Eddie the Otter will take me and my students as we continue our writing adventures with him into the year.
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At the beginning of the year I don't do much in the way of structured art lessons and I don't stress technique or skill. As one way of getting to know the children, to learn about their natural abilities as artists, I gave them hardly any guidance with this self portrait project aside from some quick modeling with a self portrait of my own. I did, however, want these self portraits to be bold and big, so I gave each student a piece of large brown construction paper (12" x 18") and a set of oil pastels. Giving them pastels, rather than crayons or colored pencils, is a way of keeping students away from the tendency to draw tiny. They were also each given a tagboard stencil of a head-and-shoulders shape to help with sizing and proportions. The results were pleasantly surprising, and to me resembled the style of Expressionist or Cubist artists. A few had a wonderfully luminous quality that only pastels can bring. This art project was also a means of getting the children to write an introductory paragraph about themselves. In fact, students had to write about themselves first before they were given their art materials, so their motivation to write was very strong! Students were given the following group of sentence frames to help them write:
My name is ______________________ and I am ______________ years old. My favorite things to do are _______________________________________. My goal in second grade is to __________________________. I was particularly fascinated by what students wrote down as their personal goals for 2nd grade. Many students wrote down subjects they enjoyed, such as math or reading (or art!). A few expressed goals such as "to not get distracted," or "to listen good." To see more self portraits, visit the Art Gallery page. One of my favorite beginning-of-the-year activities is the heart map. It's quite a visual, graphic, artsy, and simple way for children to express things that are near and dear to them, and a sneaky but engaging way of fitting in some writing as well. Moreover, I find heart maps to be valuable for me as the teacher, for me to learn about my new students. After completing our heart maps we share them with each other. A wonderful ice breaker activity, and we save them to use for future writing pieces. Here are some beautiful, detailed samples by my very own second graders:
Unassigned Day: No school on Monday, 9/17. School resumes on Tuesday, 9/18 with regular dismissal at 2:24pm.
Homework from other 2nd grade teachers: If Mrs. Guthrie, Ms. Lessner, or Mrs. Chen assign homework for their respective subject areas, students are responsible for turning it in to that specific teacher. While I do communicate with the other teachers to get an idea of what they are teaching, I do not have full details. I am pleased to see that my students are doing the work, but I will not be collecting assignments for health, social studies, or science. Red Writing Journal: Remember that each week students must write in their journals in response to a writing prompt I assign at the back of the homework packet coversheet. The journal is due on Friday morning. Students can complete the journal any day of the week as long as it is completed by Friday. The journal entry usually ties in with the current unit theme in Treasures that we are covering. Art: Our first art lesson went well. We discussed, took brief notes, and drew examples of the seven elements of art (i.e., line, shape, color, texture, form, value, and space) and made a foldable. All the 2nd graders were very keen on learning the essentials, following directions in the art room, and trying their best as artists. |
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