Writing What We Know

Lately, we've been working on using pictures, letters, and words to tell stories about our experiences and things we know a lot about. The giraffes have been working hard to add lots of detail to their drawings and also to write down all the sounds they hear in the words they are writing about. 

The Giraffes have been writing about everything from their favorite parts of our recent field trip,  visits to friends' houses, cheering on siblings at races, and planting out in our school garden! 

Now, we will work on stretching our stories out across multiple pages! Stay tuned to watch our writing GROW!

Writing Folders

Hello, Giraffe Families!

Next week, we are going to be personalizing our Writer’s Workshop folders, which will help us generate ideas for our stories throughout the year. I am going to have magazines, brochures, and printed pictures for students to use, but you child is also welcome to bring in or email their own personal pictures of their families, friends, pets, and places they’ve been to in the last year or so to add at school. We will be creating our folders on Thursday, September 14th, so if your child would like to bring in pictures to add to their folder, you can send them in on or before that date. 

To give you an idea of what these folders will look like, here are some examples of my own writing folders over the last few years:

I am very excited to see how everyone chooses to personalize their folders. Not only will it help us to support our writing, but it will also allow us all to get to know each other on a deeper level ☺Enjoy your weekend!

Sidewalk Shelebration 2017

On Wednesday, the giraffes celebrated the end of our poetry writing unit with a Sidewalk Shelebration, where we shared our poems with our friends and family by writing them "where the sidewalk ends"! 

During our unit, we learned about lots of different kinds of poetry and were inspired by reading the work of a large variety of poets. One of the biggest lessons we learned from our mentor poets was that poems are written to make the reader feel a certain way--some poems are written to make someone laugh, smile, relax, or help them understand feelings of sadness or anger. Each of us wrote lots and lots of poems during this unit, including one poem about a member of our classroom. We chose two more poems we had written to edit, revise, and illustrate and we put all of these poems into a class book of poetry. In addition to publishing our poems on the sidewalk, each of the giraffes also took home a copy of our class poetry book. 

After we finished publishing our poems, a few giraffes also chose to read their poems aloud! 

It was so wonderful to have the chance to celebrate all of our hard work with our friends and family. We are excited to celebrate another second grade milestone next week when we perform our brand new play for our SMS friends and family! 

Enjoying Springtime

The Giraffes are so excited for the spring weather, as are the rest of the students at SMS! We've been taking advantage of sunny skies and warmer temperatures and we've been trying to get outside as much as possible! 

We were able to get out in the garden at the beginning of the week for Writer's Workshop as we wrote springtime-inspired poems in our Tiny Topics notebooks

Because we switched our Related Arts time with fourth grade for the week, we also got to get out a bit more after we finished writing in the afternoon :) Our End of The Day Recesses have been a really special treat! 

Ms. Riley's been excited to join in on the fun, too! 

We are excited to continue enjoying the outdoors as we begin planting in the garden and gear up for Jump Rope for Heart and Bike to School Day! 

Celebrating Hard Work

Our Growth Mindset Tree has reached its peak foliage this week as we added examples of our final mindset stance "persistence" to its branches. Persistence is sticking with something even when it is challenging, and many of us thought about things we had to try time and time again before we got it right to add to our leaves. Many of us thought about learning to ride a bike as our example of persistence, while others thought of smaller tasks they took some time and effort to learn. 

We've been practicing persistence in our writing especially as we've been editing, revising, and illustrating our small moment stories to make our first "published" piece of writing. We used our CHOMPS checklist to make sure our writing was ready to go:

After putting a lot of time and effort into our stories (and being flexible with our changes) it was time to celebrate all of our hard work! 

Ms. Riley put out our writing along with confetti and party blowers! After admiring our own hard work, we went around the room to read everyone else's stories. After we read a story, we wrote compliments on the back (just like a real book!)

Afterwards, we took a group author photo along with our published pieces! 

While I am so incredibly proud of the time and effort that was put into each and every one of these stories, I hope you are also proud of yourself! Congratulations on your first published piece of writing in second grade, I can't wait to see where we go from here :)

Love,

Ms. Riley