Tag: second grade

This Month with 2nd Grade: Robot Dreams by Sara Varon

December 15, 2009 Children's Books, Teaching , , , , , , ,

robotdreamsI love this book. It’s very sad, but it’s also thoughtful, delightful, and real (even if it is about a dog and a robot). The kids love it.

Last year I did a unit on wordless books with 1st grade. This year in 2nd grade I wanted something quick to take us from all the library orientation we did in November into our next project in January (starting The Tale of Despereaux). This book was perfect for December. It takes about 1.5 library classes to read, and the kids were fully absorbed. It sparked an interest in other wordless books with some students.

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This Month with 2nd Grade: Learning the Library Layout

November 28, 2009 Teaching, Thoughts , ,

In October I started working with 2nd and 3rd grade on how to use the library. Each grade focused on something different, but they both did really well with it.

After our back-to-school housekeeping activities in September, I walked the 2nd graders through the sections of the library. They choose books from the shelves in 1st grade, but it’s in 2nd grade that we really started talking about what the different sections mean. We talked about fiction vs. nonfiction in 1st grade, but they needed a refresher on that. We have 4 sections in our library where students can check out books: Fiction, Nonfiction, Easy Reading, and Biography. We defined all the sections and spent A LOT of time practicing which books belong where. I explained that the spine labels have the book’s address, and I gave them some basics on how to use that information to find where the book lives. I explained the alphabetical order of the books in general terms: in 3rd grade I really go into how to find books in the nonfiction section. I don’t go over the specifics of Dewey Decimal until 3rd grade, but I do talk to the 2nd graders about the nonfiction books having numbers, and the other 3 sections having “F”, “B”, or “E”.

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Letters to Kate DiCamillo

June 8, 2009 Children's Books, Teaching , , , ,

kids with lettersI’ve mentioned (many times to anyone who’s been near me in person lately) that Kate DiCamillo signed a copy of The Tale of Despereaux at BEA09 for my students and me. I decided it would be great to have the kids write letters to Ms. DiCamillo telling her their favorite part of the book.

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Fairy Tales with 2nd Grade

April 15, 2009 Children's Books, Teaching, Thoughts , , ,

We’ve been talking about fairy tales in 2nd grade this spring, and it’s a surprisingly hard thing to define. I’ve been reading piles of information, ideas, suggestions from other librarians, etc. about how to define fairy tales. I know one when I see one, but how do you explain that to 7-year-olds? Most resources suggest that fairy tales are a subgenre of folktales. So I’d start defining a folktale as a story passed down for generations, I’d explain to the kids how years and years ago not everyone was taught to read and write, we keep them in nonfiction because they tell us about the places they came from, etc. We talked a lot about how folktales don’t have authors because they’ve been around so long that we don’t know who first invented the story. So when you look at books of folktales, they’ll say “Retold by” or “Edited by” instead of “Written by.”

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