Let's talk Common Core

Either you hate it or you love it.

Common Core.


Well, I love it. However, I have to say though that my school is pretty awesome and gives you freedom to teach how and what you want as long as you are meeting the standards (& as long as it's appropriate and challenging of course!).

So... if I don't feel our basal is meeting the needs of the students, I don't need to use it--and often, I don't! I enjoy the freedom and casualness of opening up a library book, doing a read aloud and really digesting the theme, characters, moral, etc. with my students. Getting away from the basal makes for informal instruction that is genuine and hands-on. I love pulling books from the library or news articles from online for us to read. This way of teaching (in my opinion) helps my students become independent learners. What we are doing in class is relate-able to what they might do at home.  By teaching them in the manner that I do, it shows them how they can apply what they learn in school to their real life experiences.

Anyways, we've been working HARD on characters the last few weeks.
RL 2.3 to be specific says-- Describe how characters in a story respond to major events and challenges.

We first read Arthur's Reading Race by Marc Brown. We compared/contrasted Arthur and D.W. using a Venn Diagram. My students told me they had never used a Venn Diagram before (I'm thinking they just didn't remember using one because 1st grade was OH SO LONG AGO! HA!) so we had a little fun and we compared Elsa & Anna first. If you aren't familiar with Elsa and Anna, get out from under the rock! :) They were super excited to use the Venn Diagram with their favorite Frozen characters. They were begging to compare TMNT characters and other Disney Princesses. I let them work with a neighbor to compare their favorite characters on their workmats. Real learning was taking place and I was EXCITED! These kids were pumped about comparing characters with their peers ON THEIR OWN!!! A teacher's dream---I was so very proud of how quickly they caught on! We did a few more activities with Arthur and D.W. & it was time to move on. This is a story from our basil and while it was a nice story, it wasn't really deep enough to REALLLLLLLY get into the characters. So, my teaching partner and I chose a story called Stellaluna to read. 

Stellaluna is a super cute story about a young fruit bat who gets separated from her mother and ends up with some birds. For a children's story, the characters are dynamic. They have many feelings, the characters change throughout the story and the story has emotion. (There's also the science aspect I love as well :) of course we did a mini lesson about nocturnal animals, mammals & compared fruit bats and birds on our newly discovered, handy dandy Venn Diagram!) 

My teaching partner and I wanted to do a character analysis on Stellaluna. We knew what we wanted-- and needed to meet the Common Core Standard RL 2.3 so of course we turned to teachers pay teachers to see if anyone else had come up with something. No need to reinvent the wheel! Here's where we got our Stellaluna Common Core Character study-- Click here!

It included everything we were looking for:

• Common Core standards alignment page
• 8-10 day lesson plan
• Class anchor chart examples with student pages for How Does Stellaluna Change?
• A Character's Point of View
• Teacher's Notes and Student Task Cards for each activity
• Large story vocabulary cards for a word wall or pocket chart
• Vocabulary word/definition match cards activity 
• Working with vocabulary in context student pages
• Book Talk story elements spinner and discussion starter cards
• Fluency Sticks
• Summarizing the Story color anchor chart to print or project with black and white student version
• Two Sounds of C sort with student page
• Foldable project booklet with templates and assembly directions

We're still working on completing our Stellaluna Character Analysis but the kids are having a great time with it. On Friday they made their character sticks and were practicing acting out the story using different voices for different characters. Super cute and authentic!!! (and FUN!) To end our Stellaluna lesson we are going to watch the Stellaluna movie-- it's about 30 minutes long and includes a sing-a-long. The kids always get a kick out of that!!! 

Here are some photos of our completed project (from last year):

Stay tuned for what's going on in 2nd grade Science! 

I'm new to the new Science Standards  (Next Generation) but having a great time teaching in a more hands-on, student based, think & explore first type of a way!