Persuasive Writing in 2nd Grade - Book Reviews

What exactly does persuasive writing look like in 2nd Grade?  Mrs. Forse decided to jump into persuasive writing with her 2nd grade advanced readers this past week after spending some time studying the new Common Core State Standards for Writing.  She had the kids begin by writing book reviews to convince others to read their favorite books.

First, Mrs. Forse created an anchor chart about the pieces of a good book review:

1. a hook
2. a brief summary that doesn't give away the ending
3. the reviewer's favorite part
4. who they would recommend should read the book

It was my privilege to model what this might look like.  I used the book Punt, Pass and Point, by Bonnie-Alise Leggat.  I love this book because it was written and illustrated by a third grader, which is a big selling point for kids.

After we modeled the book review to the left, kids were asked to select a favorite book of theirs to write a book review on.  The initial reviews were good, but showed some confusions and missing pieces.  Mrs. Forse took this information and did what great teachers do, she gave them another model.  This time she used the book Goodnight Goon, by Michael Rex, a parody of Goodnight Moon.  The kids loved the humor in this book.

Mrs. Forse reading Goodnight Goon.



Then Mrs. Forse had the kids use their original anchor chart, turned rubric, to build a review for Goodnight Goon.  They spent quite a bit of the discussion figuring out how to summarize the book, but making sure to leave out the ending so that they didn't spoil it.



Looking at the rubric and building the book review. Click here to see a larger version of the SmartBoard Anchor Chart.

 After writing their class version of Goodnight Goon the kids went back to work on writing and revising their own reviews.  It was fun to "see" the thinking and hard work.





Some of the early drafts were very impressive when you consider they were being written by 7 and 8 year olds.  Stay tuned.  I hope to add a few examples here soon.

Enjoy the sunshine this weekend!

Angie

Oreo Jenga and the Central Tendancies

Wow!  That title sounds like a really bad name for a garage band!  :-)  But actually, it was a ton of math learning and fun. An idea I got from a fellow teacher blogger at Runde's Room.

The advanced third grade have been learning about range, mean, median, and mode.  This is outside of their regular grade level curriculum, but has been know to show up on the math ISAT for advanced students.  I wanted them to have a fighting chance at the terms and what they mean (no pun intended) when they see them.

So...we collected data!  How many oreos could they stack without them tipping over?  They could only use one hand and once the oreo left their hand they could not touch that oreo again.  This proved difficult.

So they started stacking.  Each with 2 turns.

It was so hard not to touch them with both hands!

Then they watched them finally...

...tip...



...over!

Each student took two turns and we used their highest stacks to determine the

range: the difference between the highest and lowest value

mean: the average stack

median:  the middle value

mode:  the value (stack size) that happened most often

By far, calculating the mean was the most difficult because we had tons of addends to accurately total.

Here's the data we collected from two of the schools.

Interestingly, between all three schools, there was a central tendency of 18. :-)

The kids were overjoyed to find out that if they see a mean, median or mode question on the Math ISAT, they likely will not see quite so many pieces of data. 

Have a great weekend and weekend!

Angie



Girls and Math

I think this article from Stanford University has some important research implications about how we instruct and motivate girls in math.  Many of our own Middleton girls fall into this trap of not seeing themselves as capable and confident mathematicians.  Unfortunately, we see many of our girls, even those gifted and advanced, pulling away from advanced course work and careers in mathematics.

Food for thought as you firm up MTI Unit Studies and begin to think about instructional strategies.

Angie

http://gender.stanford.edu/news/2012/sugar-and-spice-and%E2%80%A6-math-under-achievement

Nonfiction Text Structures in One Page



Click here for the Google Doc PDF



Many of you have been using and like Beth Newingham's anchor charts for nonfiction text structures.  Nicole and I took those anchor charts and another reference sheet we came across and morphed the two. 

This one-pager is a nice compliment to the anchor charts that you can give students as a reference when they are trying to identify the structure in a passage.  It includes possible questions and signal words.  I particularly like the questions because they seem like the questions the authors would be trying to answer for the reader.

Enjoy!

Angie

Greek and Latin Roots

Check out this fun way to have kids study their Greek and Latin roots! This would be a fun way to do some last minute ISAT prep. All you need is some plastic Easter eggs (Anyone going to have TONS of these next Sunday afternoon?) and a small definition sheet. Different roots go on different halves of the eggs. Kids put the pieces together to create words and develop possible definitions. After there are a few definitions in each newly created egg, teams open them and choose either what they decide is the correct or most likely choice. The flexible side of this is that kids could create invented words or use actual vocabulary words. Either way they become more aware of roots and their basic meanings.

http://teachinginroom6.blogspot.com/search/label/Root%20Words

As always, I'd be glad to help you put this together!

Angie