Thursday, September 22, 2016


Learning to Write in Powerful Ways: 
Trying Out Craft Moves Learned from Mentor Authors


2A's new student writes about moving to Japan from Singapore. Here she is adding a detail about her dad buying her an English book.

2A student working on a 'small moment' narrative about our school fire drill. 'Rrrrrrrr went the fire alarm!'

During writers' workshop, grade two students are studying the stories written by master authors. When reading a story, we think about what the author has done that we could try out in our own writing. Today in 2A we looked at comparisons like this one in the book 'Owl Moon' by Jane Yolen.

Somewhere behind us a train whistle blew, long and low, like a sad sad song.

We asked ourselves the questions  'Why did Jane Yolen decide to use this comparison?' and 'What was the main thing she wanted to get across to the reader?'

Then as a class we revised a paragraph written by the teacher while asking ourselves the same questions.  

"This kind of purposeful, thoughtful decision making not only supports high-level thinking skills, it also conveys to children that they are no longer the little kid writers they once were."

 -Amanda Hartman and Julia Mooney, Lessons from the Masters





2A student chose a quiet spot to read this book about a cute penguin friend. She says she wants to read Cool Friend "again and again and again."


Reading Clark the Shark, a fun book connected to our unit of inquiry. In the story, Clark is trying to calm himself down like the other students because they (fish) don't want to play with him.


At the beginning of the school year, grade two students are reviewing strategies for decoding new words. Like detectives, the students learn to try out more than one strategy to "solve" a word using clues inside a word, in the sentence, and in the pictures.

Here are the 7 strategies we use in grade to read tricky words:

1) Look at the pictures for clues.

2) Get your lips ready for the first sound.

3) Find chunks in the word.

4) S-t-r-e-t-c-h the word out.

5) Try to read the sentence again and think about what makes sense.

6) Skip the word, read the sentence, and go back and try again.

7) Flip the sound for the vowel. Try the short and long vowel sounds.


Grade Two building their reading staminas with a good book








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