Second Grade Super Stars Freebie!

I am finally back and refreshed and rejuvenated after our week long Fall Break! After a quite and calm week in the Smoky Mountains I think that I'm going to like teaching at a year round school! The fall break came just at the right time and I feel ready to tackle Quarter 2.   Since its been soooo very long since I have posted I am going to update y'all on some of the things we've worked on in Writing.

Here is a picture of our Easy as P.I.E bulletin board along with our Even and Odd street from The Teacher Wife.  The board isn't the cutest but I was so proud of my students.  Their work turned out great and they had a really good understanding of the 3 different types of writing we focused on.  You can grab the papers for free here  and read more about Easy as P.I.E here.

Here are examples of all three: Persuasive, Informational and Entertaining

Next up we are working on our Second Grade Super Stars! interviewing unit.  

Students will be paired with a "famous" second grade partner and both will take turns playing the part of journalist and famous person being interviewed.  I've seen a lot of units on TPT where students do this at the beginning of the year but I couldn't find any that had students creating their own questions.  We spent a lot of time after Easy as P.I.E. learning the different between a statement and a question and I really wanted the project to be more rigorous for my students.  So in this version students are the ones who develop the questions they wanted to ask their "famous interviewee"!  We haven't finished the project yet but so far my kiddos have done a great job developing questions and follow-up questions for one word answers.  Having the students develop their own questions should also make our Authors Celebration a lot more interesting since every interview will be a little bit different. I'm excited to find out more about all my Second Grade Super Stars!  You can grab the writing papers here for free!

Easy as P.I.E!

This year I really want to improve my writing instruction along with reading, science, social studies well,.........everything else!   Last year, things were a little lack-luster in our writing workshop-to say the least!  So I just finished whipping up some brainstorming and writing papers that I'm going to use during the first couple weeks of school to introduce Authors Purpose. You can grab these for free at my TPT store by clicking on the picture below.

Students will learn what it means to Persuade, Inform and Entertain, write a piece for each purpose and then select which piece they want to publish.  I'm going to use the papers in conjunction with Hope Kings awesome and free Author's Purpose packet.  I love all of her stuff over at 2nd Grade Shenanigans!

I'm hoping that by introducing this early on my students will be thinking about Authors Purpose every time we read and write throughout the year!