Monday, October 17, 2011

Spiders!

Like many of you, we have been learning about spiders during reading for the past couple weeks. I used the topic of spiders to teach about reading nonfiction, what schema is, and how to revise misconceptions. It was so much fun, the kids were so into it, and I think they learned a lot!

First we wrote down our schema about spiders on "brain files" (I got them from the amazing ladies at lessonplansos.blogspot.com). Then, I read pages from the book, Spinning Spiders to build more spider schema.

After a couple days of reading this book and sharing what we learned (and revising misconceptions), I gave my students a Time For Kids article about different types of spiders. They worked in pairs to fill out the Spider Schema worksheet to practice finding "new learning" and adding it to their schema. 


As a culminating activity, my students wrote a paragraph about spiders. Only about half of them fit on this bulletin board, but I think it turned out cute anyway! (The other half are on the wall next to the classroom door.) I found the adorable spider paper template from Courtney at Swimming into Second Grade...so helpful!

Monday, October 10, 2011

O.R.E.O. Project!!!!!


We participated in the OREO (Our Really Exciting Online) Project this year - it was sooooo much fun! Here are some pics of some of the activities we did: 

Stacking Oreos!!!








We made rural, suburban, urban communities!

We have been studying animal groups so we made animal sculptures:


We made charts explaining their Oreo communities

This is part of a city - the Oreos are the skyscrapers and the frosting is the sidewalk :)

This is a tree for part of the rural community - looks a little like a palm tree to me though :)



Here is one complete city block