Proper Nouns, Summarizing, and Pumpkins

Last week, we were busy learning about proper nouns and summarizing.  We have worked on nouns for a couple of weeks but when you throw proper nouns into the mix, it can get a little confusing.

The students made an anchor chart for proper nouns.

As a review, we did a sort of common and proper nouns in our notebooks.

We also worked on summarizing.  Last week, we read The Ugly Vegetables so we wrote a summary for the story.  This can be a tricky concept because, sometimes, students want to tell every detail about the story.

The library held a pumpkin decorating contest.  Pumpkins could not be carved and has to resemble a children's book or character from a children's book.  2nd grade did The Magic School Bus Goes Batty.

Some 2nd grade students decorated their own pumpkins, too.  What a great job! 

This week we will be talking about main idea/details, visualizing, and verbs.  

Communities

With the short week last week, we did not work from our Journeys curriculum.  Instead, we focused on social studies and talked about communities: rural/urban/suburban and community helpers.

After watching a BrainPop Jr. video, we made a chart and wrote down things we would find in urban, suburban, and rural communities.

Then we made a diagram from our information.  We talked about how Park City would be a suburban community and Salt Lake City would be an urban community.

 As a review at the end of the week we made a venn diagram, comparing and contrasting urban and rural communities.

We also talked about community helpers.  After reading our story, Community Helpers, the students wrote about the community helper s/he thought was most important and why. 

Writing Galore!

We try to incorporate writing into as much as we can.  On Fridays, however, we really focus on the organizational component.  By the end of 2nd grade, students are expected to write, at least, a topic sentence, detail sentence, explanation sentence, and concluding sentence.  Here are a few samples:

In response to our story called Teacher's Pets...

writing about their favorite thing to do in Park City...

Last week, we started collecting research on bats.  

We will be putting that information into an information paragraph about bats.  Here is a start...

We've also been talking about plural nouns...