Writing Standards with Fun Activities (Part 4)

Each year I am challenged in how I can adequately increase the writing competencies of my students in project-based learning activities. When I partnered with another teacher, we created a checklist of what we had to complete by the end of the school year to meet all writing competencies. These activities included:

Writing teachers must understand the rules for grade level writing standards.
The teachers must consider various activities that will fully engage and inspire diverse learners.
Writing activities must be fun while meeting a wide range of reading and writing abilities within a class. This ensures differentiated instruction that is equitable and successful for all students.
Writing teachers must research and collect resources that will support an engaging writing activity in the classroom.

What I Must Teach

I also reviewed and summarized the California writing standards for my second-grade class that included:

Write opinion pieces with an introduction and reasons for supporting an opinion.
Write an informational/expository text with an introduction, supporting facts, and a concluding statement.
Write narratives about a sequence of events with details, thoughts, and feelings in an organized order of explanations.
Produce writing that is organized according to task and purpose.
Learn to revise and edit with support from the teacher and peers.
Learn to use digital tools to publish writing products in collaboration with peers.

What Students Have Learned

When reviewing this list, my class has already created an informational text on learning more about rattlesnakes and how antivenom can neutralize a venomous rattlesnake bite. Next, my class completed a reflective narrative about how they researched and created the snake story with our writing teacher, Mrs. Burke. Most students were impressed with how Mrs. Burke shared her story about being a rattlesnake survivor after being bitten and medicated with antivenom from a horse. Many expressed relief that they would not die from a rattlesnake bite and that there are medications that will save them from a bite. Finally, students wrote an opinion story about how they plan to protect themselves from rattlesnake bites when working in their garden or hiking with their family. Most do not want to ever encounter a rattlesnake. Many also feel confident they now know how to protect themselves from a bite.

What We Must Still Learn

As I initiate second semester writing assignments, students will now focus on more collaborative writing and editing assignments while working on their Chromebooks. Their activities will include writing a fantasy story in the winter months and completing a career path research writing project in the spring time.

Much success as you engage your students with differentiated collaborative writing projects.

How Covid Affected Student Learning – Part 2

The Community and Schools Shut Down

Businesses were shutting down and asking employees to work from home. My husband was one of the last employees to work at his computer company. It made absolutely no sense to me why he was being required to go to work when the barista, serving coffee in the company lobby, was staying home. Finally, my husband received a phone call from his boss to work from home. I guess that Wednesday was the last normal day I can remember during the Covid pandemic. The next day, my husband worked from home and I worked at the school.

Then came Friday, March 13th. The day started out normal. One student complained about another as we entered the classroom after the morning bell rang. All of a sudden, the power flickered. My heart skipped a beat as the power generator kicked on and power was restored. Five minutes later, the school phone system went down, the power went out, and the internet was down. I think my heart stopped beating at that moment. My thoughts were that we are being invaded. What am I going to do? Will I have to evacuate and take my students up to a cul-de-sac at the top of a hill to stay safe? I could not imagine how I could evacuate and keep 24 fearful seven-year-olds calm while hiking up a hill? Most pictures in my head looked like hysteria.

I took a breath, got out my phone, and called my husband for many reasons. We live around the corner. I needed to know how widespread this was. I was in full panic mode. I thought that was pretty clever for the terrorists to shut down the internet. Cutting off communication made this a whole different ball game. Feelings of isolation started to settle in and my own fear was getting the best of me. I needed to hear his voice. My first question was is the power out at home? He said no. A wave of relief spread across my entire body. I think I felt all my muscles relax. Then I asked is the internet out at home. Another no! Thank goodness. Okay, now I can begin to think again. The question now was what the heck is going on? The level of anxiety was hitting like a roller coaster in the classroom. (Many of you who are teachers right now are thinking what in the heck were the students doing while she was on the phone. All this took place during my lunch break.) With the time remaining, I headed up to the front office for a bio break. I arrived in the staff room simultaneously with the principal. She was sitting down and looked as though she was in shock. She delivered the news to those of us on the second lunch period that she has to shut the school down. She couldn’t believe her own words.

How Do I Say Goodbye to My Students?

What I hate most about what happened next was that my gut instinct was right. I was only told to pack the students up because we are closing the school down. The virus was spreading and we could no longer keep students and staff safe. The immediate thoughts around campus were that we would be back in three weeks. Maybe it was my degree in Biological Sciences that guided me that day, or my work in biotech for five years. But my instincts that day led me to pack the students up with their workbooks for the rest of the year. It’s never a good feeling being right about difficult things and this was one of them. I taught the rest of the day as normal as possible. When the final bell rang, I walked the students to their parents and returned to my classroom. Friday, March 13th 2020 marks the last day that my second graders would see a classroom for 18 months.

Flake by flake, traumas continued to fall upon us. Power outages, failed internet connectivity, massive California forest fires, not to mention teaching seven-year-olds how to video conference. We needed time to heal. We needed the snow to melt.

Welcome New School Year

The 2020-2021 school year could be a novel on its own. The distance learning curve was brutal and the expectations were incredibly unrealistic. All that aside, where are we now? I was crushed by my own personal obligation to close the student’s learning gap and the trauma caused by online learning.

This coming school year my expectations have to shift. The students in front of me are not the students I have known during my teaching career. They need social emotional lessons grounded in team building and resiliency. STEM projects, music, art, and literacy intervention will be focus of what these children need to heal the trauma from the last two years of learning.

How Covid Affected Student Learning – Part 1

The Week of March 4th, 2019

The country had been going crazy with the politics of President Trump. Protesters were wreaking havoc in cities. Random fires were being set. A real threat to our safety was felt throughout the neighborhood, school, and home.

My first experience/awareness of the panic with COVID-19 was a routine Thursday evening trip to Costco. The parking lot was full like it was a day in December getting close to the holiday season. We could barely find a place to park. The store was packed and buzzing with people. This is super unusual for Thursdays. The main reason I shopped on that day of the week was because it was not packed. On this particular Thursday you could find some people masked while shopping.

The next unusual thing I noticed at Costco was the empty refrigeration meat containers. Not a single piece of chicken was in the store. This was so hard to believe. I bumped into a former coworker. After exchanging pleasantries, I asked her if she felt something strange going on or was it just me. That is when she said that she thought people were reacting to the threat of the Covid virus spreading. Her feelings were confirmed when I rounded over to the toilet paper area and discovered the entire floor to ceiling stocking area was completely depleted of any kind of bathroom tissue.

Small Changes at School

Leading up to the next week at school, students were discussing Leprechaun traps. We were also beginning our unit on double digit subtraction with regrouping. (As any second-grade teacher will tell you, subtraction with regrouping is a challenging hurdle for seven-year-olds.) Although the students were ready to take on the many ways they could decompose numbers, it was a transition period. Mild anxiety was already lurking in the perimeter of the classroom. It just hadn’t taken a front row seat yet.

As I mentioned earlier, our anxiety wasn’t unwarranted. The Covid pandemic and school closures matched all the terror, fear, and anxiety our school community had experienced the previous summer when the foothills next to the school were set on fire by an arsonist. The amount of political unrest at that time, coupled with this act of terror, really caused our community to panic. It was hard to separate truth from fiction. Was this an activist? Were activists setting random fires to split the city’s resources so they could then pillage through local residential homes? For the first time in my life, I felt a serious personal threat to myself and my family. Although the fire was put out and an arrest was made, the fear of the upcoming Covid school closure added to the anxiety that had previously unfolded in the lives of these seven-year-olds. It felt as though each new event fell like a snowflake to an ever-increasing imminent avalanche of tragedies.

The Week of March 13th, 2019

Anxiety took center seat on Friday, March 13th. That week, students started seeing a heightened level of cleaning taking place. Each day, school desks would get wiped down. Door knobs were disinfected. Procedures for coughing and sneezing socially were being reviewed in the classroom. There was a definite undercurrent flowing on campus of unspoken fear and concern. And that’s when I heard the words that will stamp my timeline forever. “Mrs. Gentry, is it here yet?” My mind was split with trying to decipher the question. Is it here yet? Is what here, I’m thinking of what could this little one student possibly be talking about. Such a vague question. And that’s when I took the leap and asked, are you talking about the virus? To which more than one student replied, “Yes!” And that’s when I knew we had a problem and it was time to address it.

How Do You Describe Covid to a Child?

I sat my students down and explained that it’s not quite like a green cloud of evil crawling over the hills or like a blanket of thick fog in the early mornings of February. We talked about colds and how this virus was similar and different. I reminded them that they already knew what to do and we would just have to practice it more often. I doubt my little conversation helped calm the fears they were seeing develop over time, both at home and within their classroom.

By midweek disinfecting after class became routine. The struggle to understand why children seemed to be safe but not the elderly was becoming an uncomfortable familiar conflict in my head. It led to a lot of questions about the students being the carriers and should the adults start protecting themselves.

Note: How Covid Affected Student Learning – Part 2 will be published on August 9, 2022.

Let’s Talk Math Strategies

My second-grade students are asked to fluently add and subtract within 100 when using strategies based on place value, properties of operations, and/or the relationship between addition and subtraction per CCSS 2 NBT.5. Was that a mouthful? It’s a lot of words to explain how one can use different place value strategies when adding and subtracting two-and-three-digit numbers. This approach is a big departure from the kind of math I was taught when I was my students’ age.

Relaxation Strategies for Learning

I’d like to introduce you to some of the different elements that go into educating the minds of these young seven-year-olds. In distance learning, it is paramount that the students are able to tell me what their readiness is to learn. We accomplish this through an emotional check-in. After a quick temperature check of the anxiety level the class has moving into the lesson, we center by taking a predetermined and preferred brain break. Some students may snap their finger 50 times while counting to 50. Others take three breaths or say a personal mantra. These strategies are intended to release discomfort and refocus students’ minds to tackle some math concepts that may cause stress due to the nature of trying something that is new. We acknowledge our present emotional state, regulate by using a practiced coping strategy, and then turn our centered attention toward receiving the lesson.

Math Teaching Strategies

If you’re ready now, take some breaths and I will introduce you to some of the strategies that a young seven-year-old wrestles with daily in second grade.

The first one is the number bond strategy. This is formally known as a fact family. Students take the knowledge learned in first grade and really put it to work when adding and subtracting two-and-three-digit numbers as seen in the photo of circled number groupings.
The next strategy is a ten frame. This common tool was first introduced in kindergarten to train students to readily see a number when it is organized in a consistent predictable pattern. In second grade, students use the ten-frame to help them organize their place value discs when using the hundreds, tens, and ones’ chart per the HTO (Hundreds, Tens, Ones Place Value) photo.
The last most widely used strategy is the number line as shown in the photo. Specifically, we use an open or empty number line.

Student Solving Options

The purpose of using multiple problem-solving strategies is to give each student a choice. This option empowers the student to take control of whatever strategy they feel they will be efficient using. We define efficiency in math as being quick, easy to use, and that gets us to the right answer most of the time. Students prefer using the number line because it is easy to use and has a high success rate. Secretly, I think they love it because they don’t have to do the standard addition or subtraction algorithm.

There you have it. Three different strategies second graders are using to conquer the common core state standard of adding and subtracting numbers to 100 using strategies based on place value.

Much success exploring math solutions with your children!

Danielle

Building Resilliency Skills for Kids

Building Resiliency Skills for Kids

This past year our students have been learning remotely in Goggle classrooms. Each morning, our second graders spend an hour focusing on their social-emotional needs. Our school has adopted the FranklinCovey’s K-12 Leader in Me (see www.TheLeaderInMe.org) curriculum so support students’ personal growth based on Stephen R. Covey’s The Leader in Me book. The seven habits that we focus on with a variety of reflective activities include:

Be proactive by taking responsibility for personal choices and behaviors.
Begin with the end in mind by setting goals.
Put first things first by achieving the most important things first.
Think win-win so that everyone can win.
Seek first to understand, then to be understood by learning to listen first and talk second.
Synergize by having folks work together to achieve a better solution.
Sharpen the saw to achieve balance in life.

Stress Reduction Strategies

Additionally, our students learn to overcome failure in various learning situations through stress reduction strategies. These may include:

Learning to say positive messages to themselves when they feel they are failing or getting frustrated with a situation. Three videos that we use in class to overcome this negative mindset and help our students persevere include https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOaFwwLyTRo,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ampy3IFt6k, and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Su7gegYKDy4

Using basic relaxation strategies used in meditation, yoga, and deep breathing exercises
Practicing effective visualization exercises to view how they may overcome challenges
Writing a mantra or motto to say to themselves when they are feeling fearful or anxious about a situation
Taking brain breaks to relax and refocus during a very challenging lesson or for essential breaks from remote learning

Much success as you explore and practice these resiliency skills at home with your children and families!

Danielle