I have received a few emails asking if the Mosaic list is offline. Rest assured that we are up and running. I'm thinking that many districts are on Spring Break this week???
This is a great time to share what you have been focusing on in your classrooms. Or to ask any questions you may have about comprehension instruction. I've been working on nonfiction reading/research using questioning as our springboard. We studied honeybees (Life Science standard) whole class these past three weeks. Now when we return from break, we are launching our Physical Science standard study (energy, matter, electricity, sound/light, gravity, magnetism, simple machines). I've gathered all the guided reading leveled books I can find in our school on these topics (our district did a HUGE buy of Pearson SuccessNet books) and later this week I am going to the public library to grab all the easier books on our topics. I had my kids previewing all the Pearson books for two days. Mostly just exposing them to the topics we will be studying. They wrote down new learnings in their learning journals. We've been working on listening to the inner signal (visual or auditory) that goes off when we read something new that is important. My kids will choose their top three areas to study by interest. I will assign them in small groups to become the "experts" in one area. I am also using the Lucy Calkins Unit of Study on Nonfiction Writing so they will be writing "All About" books on their topic. We'll start off by listing our "I wonder...."s. I've done this sort of "study" with third and fourth graders but this has been my first time with second graders. They did a great job when we were all studying honeybees (as our model). I had our librarian borrow all the honey, honeybees, and beekeeper books from the other schools in our district plus I supplemented with books from the public library. We read a fiction book as our anchor (and to activate schema) and then we wrote 5 chart papers of "I wonder...."s. They read for days trying to find answers to the class questions. Then we grouped into "chapters" of interest (life cycle, how do bees make honey, how do bees communicate, beekeepers, parts of a bee, interesting/important facts about bees, types of bees, etc.) and the groups became the experts. I didn't have them write a "book" but rather gave each group a chart paper and they could represent their learnings as they chose. Then they presented their learnings to the whole class. We watched two movies on honeybees and we even had a REAL beekeeper come and talk to our class. It was so validating when he started off by asking my kids what they know about bees and they just rattled off TONS of information. All things THEY learned by THEIR OWN reading. Not taught by me lecturing at them. VERY POWERFUL!! I will be doing some whole group explicit mini lessons on each science topic to be sure that everyone gets a base of new learnings. But for the most part they will teach each other with their "All About" books. I like to do science and social studies this way. It puts all the strategies to use in real reading. Yeah, they aren't perfect at it yet, but it's a start and to me, it is all about building background knowledge towards deeper study as they get older. Learning how to navigate nonfiction text is HUGE in life and this is a sure way to capture their interest. After studying nonfiction conventions and doing a lot of modeling and guided groups on catching/reporting new learnings, we are on a roll. That's what's been happening in my little world. Check in with us on what YOU'VE been doing with your students! Ginger moderator grade 2 _______________________________________________ Mosaic mailing list Mosaic@literacyworkshop.org To unsubscribe or modify your membership please go to http://literacyworkshop.org/mailman/options/mosaic_literacyworkshop.org. Search the MOSAIC archives at http://snipurl.com/MosaicArchive.
