Week of January 30th.

Week of January 30^th.

I wanted to celebrate the students hard work they have been doing in their reading and writing unit this month.  In reading, the students have been reading series books.  They have been getting to know their characters and finding patterns in how the characters act.  They have also found patterns in they way the series go.  In writing, they have been writing reviews of food, books, and movies. 

During our Reader’s workshop on Monday, I told the students we would be celebrating our hard work in reading and writing by sharing a poster of our books in our series with the other second grade classes.  I told them we would work on the posters during reading and writing today and tomorrow (Tuesday) and share our posters at the end of the day Tuesday.  I shared an example of a poster I made so they could see the criteria they needed to include on their poster.  The students saw that I included a review of one of the books in my series, a list of other books in the series, a list of the characters in the books with pictures of the characters, a list of the patterns I found in each of the books, and a final recommendation of the series I read.  The students asked questions about the criteria and asked if they could add things to their poster if they wanted like; information about each character, and if they found something that happened in the series that was surprising to them (something that happened that was out of character or out of the pattern); the students took great notes during their reading so, they really had a lot of information.  I told them the criteria on my example is what they would need to get a 3 and anything else they could add would make their poster a 4.

The students worked like busy ants storing food for the winter and by Tuesday at the end of the day they were excited to share their poster with the other second grade classes.  After our sharing, we came back to our classroom and toasted with juice and ate cookies.

The next day we started our new writing unit.  The unit for the month of February is: Writing adapted Fairytales, Folktales, and Fables.  To kick off this unit we are spending several days reading and charting our findings then, we will begin working on writing our own versions of classic tales and finally we will make up our own stories.  I began the unit defining Fairytales, Folktales, and Fables.  On Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday this week, we started to investigate these types of books and charted what we noticed about how they began and ended, the characters, the settings, the plots, good vs. evil and who always wins, elements of magic, etc.  We were able to find patterns in these stories and list them, which will help the students when they begin to write their own versions. 

The other part of this entry is supposed to focus on recent data.  I have recently collected data from another Writing On Demand (WOD) sample, which again, a WOD is when students are asked to write a personal narrative small moment story with a scripted prompt and no direct pre-teaching.  These WOD’s are scored by me using a continuum and sent to my district to try and determine the effectiveness of our writing curriculum.  I used this data initially as part of my base-line data.  Although I have this writing sample from my students, I have not been able to analyze all of it yet.  I should be able to post my analysis of the data on my next entry.