Valentine's Day Fourth and Second Grade

Hi all-  It's Damien!  Kelly and I will be joint blogging this post to share about our Valentine's activities.  Some background information before we begin. In order to battle childhood obesity and to "save the instructional integrity of the day" our Valentine's (non)celebrations had to be low key.  It's sad when we forget that we are working with children, but I'll get off my soapbox for now because this is a FUN post about what we were able to do.  


FOURTH GRADE:

I started my Valentine boxes on Wednesday.  I was inspired by something I saw on Pinterest and was going to have my class turn their Cheerios boxes into Hedwig, the snow-white owl from the Harry Potter series.  Perfect for my classroom theme, perfect since we just began The Sorcerer's Stone, and perfect because they wouldn't take forever.  Our first task was feathers!  We covered our boxes with white copy paper and used strips of tissue paper cut and folded to build our feathers.  Take a look!

So, day 1 was happily complete including some music from my Disney Pandora playlist and then it SNOWED....AGAIN!  On Thursday we had our 5th snowday of the school year and although I enjoyed sleeping in, all I kept thinking was "Doesn't Al Roker know I have Valentine Boxes to finish?". (I blame all bad wether on Al Roker).  

And then...Friday was  a delayed opening.  Again all the joys of sleeping in but we had some boxes to finish so cards could be distributed.  As soon as the kiddos arrived, we got to work. Although I had originally envisioned wings and fethers all around, I was rather pleased with the final result. 

After cards were distributed we celebrated friendship with some chocolate fondue.  We were only allowed to dip healthy items (apples, bananas, strawberries) but I was able to sneak in some graham crakers and pretzels.  It was a nice way to spend a delayed opening. Now I'm going to turn it over to Kelly for a Second Grade Valentine's Day. 

Take a peek at a February ELA activity I did with my fifth graders last year that had them analyzing the characters in their novels. Literature Love Letters

See ya later Buddies, 
Damien 

SECOND GRADE: We were also supposed to keep it low key in 2nd grade.  So I saved our extra recess time we earned and incorporated it into celebration time.  I always do centers for my parties, I mean celebrations!  So we had four centers: delivering Valentine's (with no candy attached), eating yummy cupcakes, unscramble the Valentine words, and candy shop vowels.  Yes, I did sneak in some learning but this class loves to learn.  Here are some pictures:

  Love the ipod boxes.

                                            Unscramble the Valentine words

                                                                              

                                        Yummy cupcakes

                                   Long vowel learning!!

If my kiddos finished early at any of the centers they grabbed a clipboard which had a valentine word search.  15 minute rotations work perfect!  Another successful low key celebration.

Reading Buddies and Valentine's were both on Friday!  So we gathered our classes together and Damien read Roses are Red Violets are Pink Your Feet Really Stink by Deanna DeGroat.  The story has a perfect message and cute poems. Then our kids wrote their own poems about friendship.  Great Reading Buddy lesson.

What did you do on Valentine's Day?

Kelly

Literature Love Letters- An ELA Activity and a FREEBIE

Hello friends!

My kiddos and I have been working hard on analyzing characters. We have been using some GREAT novels for the skill:

-Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone: (this is our core novel-tier 1 that I use to model the skills to my kids)
-Holes: my mid level guided reading novel
-George Washington's Socks: low level guided reading novel
-Among the Hidden Series: challenge level guided reading novel

We have broken down character traits into three parts: 
1. Physical appearance 
2. Character traits
3. Background information

We have spent a great deal of time digging deeper in order to understand all our Hogwarts characters. One of the projects I did in class to give my students the opportunity to practice their skills, and prove mastery, is Literature Love Letters.

I introduce the project telling the students that we will be writing love letters. They groan and I love it. I tell them their love letters will have to include all of the character traits of the person they are writing to and provide some examples. (Think-Anthony, I love your long brown curls; Kaitlin I love how kind you are; etc). Then, because I have a certain flair for the dramatic, I tell the gang they will be writing letters to each other. They groan again and I love it more! I let this go one for a bit and then I tell them that they will be writing to any characters from the novels they are reading or have read this year. Now the excitement, and relief, kicks in.

Here is a sample of the product available on my TPT store

The activity I am sharing today includes brainstorming pages, heart shape paper for your final copy, and a VERY simple template to trace the shoulders and head of the character. The students will write a love letter to their chosen character expressing all their character traits. They have fun choosing evil characters and writing about how they LOVE their evil ways. I also encourage the kids to sign the love letters "yours truly" or "your secret admirer" so that they feel comfortable writing to whomever and whatever they want.

Here are some of this years Literature Love Letters:

Letter in progress...

A love letter to Voldemort and Hermione

Voldemort

Dumbledore

Dumbledore, King Flint Sky God (From The Well of Sacrifice), and Stanley Yelnats (from Holes)

Peeves, Voldemort, and Hermione from the Harry Potter Series

The Warden (of Holes fame)

Ron Weasley and Prof. Flitwick

The display outside the classroom

Check out my project at my TPT store HERE. I will happily send a freebie to the first three followers who comment below telling me who they would write their literature love letter to. Don't forget to include your email in the post so I can send the file to you.

Your buddy,
Damien

Franny K. Stein is in the house

Franny K. Stein mad scientist ROCKS!

Well I worried all summer about what chapter books I would read to my second grade class that would make them love READING.  You see in first grade it's a no brainer because every first grader loves Junie B. Jones.  Anyway I can't tell you how over the moon my entire class is about reading Franny K.  The only problem is that they have all gone to the library or bought books in the series so it is hard to do predictions but who cares!  I have boys reading during indoor recess because they can't wait to read the end of the book!!  I have to say this character traits chart has helped in the motivation, so of course each student made their own flip book like in story one.

I truly encourage all second grade teachers to use this as a read aloud most of the books have a good author's message.  The best part is that I show the book on my  projected screen because eventhough it is a chapter book each page has pictures also.  So what are you waiting for go buy Franny K. Stein by Jim Benton.

Junie B. Jones

                                                             Junie B. Jones

Finally finished reading Junie B. Jones Dumb Bunny  by Barbara Park on the last day of school before Spring break!  Better late then never.  To celebrate my favorite book character, Junie B., and all of her adventures my class imitates the activities from each book.  In this story there is a jelly bean game in order to win what's in the pretty box.  All the children have to stick their hand in a bag and whoever picks the one purple jelly bean wins what's in the box. So we played the same game, I have the pretty box all set up.  My class is sitting in a circle and we start to review what happened in the story and all the scenarios that could happen while playing. For example, there will only be one winner and if the purple jelly bean is picked before it's your turn the game is over, just like in the book.  Also in our school it is frowned upon to eat foods of minimal nutrition so jelly bean eating is a no, no!  I just got finished explaining that we couldn't eat the jelly bean after they picked one from the bag because I would get in trouble.  Then one of my smarty pants student says, who will know, what, are there cameras in the classroom and the police will show up if we eat a jelly bean!  Like magic my principal walks in the room, couldn't have been better timing.  My response was we are going to be "Bucket Fillers" and do the right thing and here is the police now!  That smarty learned a lesson and the game began. It was great my student observer tally graphed the jelly bean colors that came out of the bag and half way through one lucky duck picked the purple one!  My principal was so surprised at the student's reactions who never got a turn, they were all bucket fillers.  I am sure you are wondering what was in the box. I asked my students what I should buy to put in the box for our game because they always have the best ideas.  In the book, the prize is a bunny costume, so  in our box were bunny ears and a chocolate bunny.  The winner left the ears on all day! 

The day before we had a golden egg hunt, just like the book!  We also include our reading buddies in on the fun. We hide the eggs on the playground, each child gets 2 colored eggs filled with chocolate but the best prize is the golden egg. The reading buddies both get the prize no matter which one of them find the golden egg. The winners get a Barnes N Noble gift card and a no homework pass.

 Besides all the fun activities we made a character trait of Junie B as we read each chapter. At the end of the story we listed setting, characters, problem and solution on a bunny of course!  All the kiddos made a miniature bunny and wrote text to self connections. OOPS forgot to take pictures of the mini bunnies.

When we come back from break my question of the day will be which activity did you like better the jelly bean game or the golden egg hunt?

 
             Junie B. Jones Dumb Bunny

Can't wait to get started reading the next Junie B book!

Kelly