Student Created Anchor Charts: Compare and Contrast

Again this week, we worked on "Student Created Anchor Charts" during our "intervention time". This is when about 8 of the kids are out of the room getting reading and math intervention and I'm looking to challenge the kids that are left with projects and extra review of skills. This week I used my Reading Wonders leveled readers for the week and the skill for the week: Compare and Contrast.

Last week, we did a similar activity to practice Main Idea and Details.

First, students read the book with others in their reading group. The books are leveled, so this was a nice way to differentiate it very quickly.

Each group or set of partners then worked on creating a rough draft compare/contrast anchor chart on regular paper by using my anchor chart from a lesson earlier in the week as an example and reminder of how to compare and contrast.

    

We finished the reading and rough drafts on the first day of the project. Day two (which ended up being a few days later due to snow days!) was actually using those rough drafts to create the full size anchor chart with markers. The kids love this!

   

    

 

Student Created Anchor Charts: Main Idea and Details

This was a true, authentic group activity that we tried a few weeks ago. Again, I say.... it's authentic. The student created anchor charts are created by second graders that are really doing some amazing thinking and collaborating, even if they don't look Pinterest worthy! :) I think they did a great job for their first try!

In order to practice main idea and detail skills, we used a product from Meet Miss Parker that included differentiated reading passages! 

Students were put into differentiated groups and were told to read the passage and start determining what they thought was the main idea of the passage and then some details to go with that main idea.

Here are the passages, as you can see the same passage is in three different lexile levels.

 

These are the Differentiated Reading Comprehension Passages for Winter by Meet Miss Parker

Students read the passage first:

 

Then out came my stash of markers (the ones that kids are allowed to use, haha) and some big newsprint paper.

I gave students a kind of "bones" anchor chart to work with, to let them know what needed to be included. Some of them used creativity to changes up a little, but overall they knew they had to have the main idea and three details.

Work in progress!

Overall, they did a great job and I can't wait to implement more projects like this! My higher level kids really need good "thinking" projects like this!! Loved it!

 

   

 

Introducing Coins & Counting Money

When we return from Spring Break, we are going to start digging into coins and counting money. My kids never do as well with this as I hope they will, so I'm looking for more inspiration. What is the best thing you do to teach your students money? Last week, we had a few days before Spring Break with extra time that I started to introduce things and we did a few activities for me to try to gauge where they are when it comes to money.

We read the short coin books that are shown laying across the top of my anchor chart and as we read it, we added these details to our anchor chart together. My plan is to get them to really "know" the coins so that they will remember what each one is worth.

Then to gauge where they are, I gave them this simple task of showing me as many ways as they can of making 25 cents. Most of them did pretty well. I gave them this fun "March" notepad paper to make it more engaging. Plus, the coins kept them pretty engaged.

 

I'd love to hear more from other 2nd grade teachers. What are your favorite money activities? What are your strategies?