Soaring in Second Grade

When adults go to work, at some point each day they must be able to successfully use each of the 4 C’s.  What are the 4 C’s you ask…

• Collaborations: working together, by sharing ideas and making decisions, to make and do things.
• Communication:  Talking and really listening to each other while making and doing things.
• Critical Thinking: Thinking in ways that let us ask questions, understand, and solve problems to make and do things.
• Create: Making and doing unique things!

We know adults have to do this each day, so why not give kids a chance to learn to do things while they are at school each day, too!

This is exactly why we take time each week to complete a STREAM project.  Each project is related to: Science, Technology, Reading, Engineering, Art, or Math (STREAM) and gives our class a fun place to practice and build their 4 C skills, while learning about the world around them, too.

So far, we have completed 3 fun, unique, and challenging projects this year.  I am amazed by what the class has already created!

As the year continues, it will be so great to watch the class complete projects that involve science, engineering, technology, math, too!  I love watching my students learn and create projects because they also learn and create their identities at the same time, too!  STREAM is such a great way to let our students take the lead in their own learning.

I would like to thank Tracy Ferguson, Shannon Miller, and Jessica Burke from VanMeter School District for designing, organizing, and sharing the STREAM framework with us at Cody Elementary!

Based on the the title, you might be thinking we are living in a world of rainbow and unicorns in 2nd grade right now.  However, our world of writing is transforming from good to great with our Stars, Wishes, Gobstoppers, and each other.

You might not know what a star is in 2B.  When we share our writing with each other, which we always do, we like to first let our author friends know exactly what we like about their writing piece.  We call this a “star.”

Of course, we care so much about each other, so we want to help each other write the best possible story or paragraph we can.  So next, students share their wishes.  What is a wish?  It is a suggestion for improvement.  We read our partner’s story to think of wishes we want to share.  As we read, our eyes notice ways to go from good to great.

To help us figure out exactly what is needed to take a story from good to great, we use our Gobstopper.  Our Gobstopper isn’t the tasty candy you might be thinking about.  Instead, this is a bulls-eye style graphic organizer that we make together.  Each part of the of the gobstopper moves us closer to what is needed to write a great story.  All of our story elements: character, setting, problem, and solution have a place on our Gobstopper, so we can pinpoint exactly which parts of the story we should keep improving and how to improve them.

Stay tuned, our young authors will soon be publishing some great stories with the help of our Stars, Wishes, Gobstoppers, and each other!

Process over Product is a phrase I have often heard buzzing around my professional development recently.  Yes, absolutely, honoring both our students’ process and our own process as teachers is so very critical. I’m so glad that we are in a day and age where the learning process is getting valued.

At the same time, after hearing the phrase, I always find myself taken aback.  If we minimize the product, this feels like we are then undervaluing the vision we have for our outcomes.  This vision is the very thing that keeps my learners and myself moving through our process, especially when the process gets challenging and messy, as it always does.  So what if we rethought this phrase, and instead of looking at it as “process OVER product” we readjust to think “process WITH product?”

This is exactly what can easily happen now with Flipgrid’s new feature, FlipgridAR.  For those of you new to Flipgird or new to FlipgridAR, this is a tech tool that easily allows students to record short videos, often in “selfie” style.  It is a totally free app, and teachers are able to create and organize topics with prompts for students to follow when making their videos. All topics can be conveniently organized into a single grid.  You can check out the new FlipgridAR feature in my Twitter post below:

Twitter Post: FlipgridAR

With FlipgridAR, we can now easily connect students’ process with their work.  As my mentor and teacher, Beth Campbell said recently, “If we honor their process, we need to give them time to reflect, both as they are learning and creating and at the end.  Let them explain where they have been along the way to their creation and explain where they want it to go.” 

My head has been recently humming with so many ideas for how to use FlipgridAR with my students.  But I think I’m going to narrow it down to just three questions to have my students answer when they reflect on their process using FlipgridAR:

• 1) What are you proud of?
• 2) What do you want us to know about how you made this?
• 3) Where do you want to see it go next?

How powerful it will be to give students a chance to explain their journey and their hopes for any work they post or share to an audience.  Now with FlipgridAR, anyone viewing student work will be able to hear the students explain their journey. This takes us past sharing, to the much more powerful experience of highlighting, as AJ Julianni explains in his recent blog post (it’s fantastic, please check it out!).  Students will have the peace of mind that comes when knowing your audience truly understands you. 

When we connect student process to their products, it can open doors for understanding that move both the creator and the audience forward.  I cannot wait to give my students this opportunity next year. I am so excited to see how it impacts their journey as both creators and learners!

This time of year, my Twitter feed is filled with posts from my favorite educators as they share their One Word for the new year. It’s amazing what happens when so many people share their One Word with each other. What starts off as just “one,” quickly becomes much more.  I find myself inspired by the variety of words my Twitter friends have chosen to help them grow and improve in the new year.  I begin to improve through the power of others’ One Word.

Thinking about how others’ One Words are moving me forward, I realized that we could do the same in class.  One of my amazing teaching partners was inspired by the Thinker Builder’s One Word blog post, so we had our kiddos start the year with their One Word. They had the chance to think of how they wanted to make their 2019 great.

In addition to choosing a One Word for themselves, my kiddos also started to think about how the power of our words could help us share the love of some of our favorite books with each other, too.

As we all know, second grade is often considered that year when students switch from “learning to read” to “reading to learn.” But I have also learned to see it as a year when second graders switch from saying “I can read” to saying “I’m a reader!” This is why it’s so important for me to build a culture of readers in class each year. To create this culture I do some different things throughout the year. I work hard to help my kiddos understand what it means to read “good fit books.”  I hold conferences with my students regularly to help them find new books they will love and enjoy.  With the help of one of my favorite tools, SeeSaw, students also make book talks to help each other get fresh ideas for the next great book they might want to read.

We wondered what kind of power One Word would have on our Culture of Readers. So we started 2019 remembering that we could use adjectives to describe things. We thought about our favorite stories and thought about which adjectives we could use to describe the parts of those favorite stories. We listed several words that we could use to describe the characters, the setting, the events, and the central messages of our favorite books.  Then it was time to send my kiddos off into the library with a pencil and a Post-it. The students got to pick some of their favorite books they’ve read throughout the year and put a Post-it on the cover with a One Word to describe it. Now when you look at my classroom you’ll see some of our favorite books decorated with these notes. The boys and girls have had so much fun looking through the library, finding and reading the One Words, and discovering new books to enjoy! Books that had been ignored all year are suddenly getting a new life! It’s amazing the power one little word can have. The power of the One Word is spreading once again.

Take a look at my students’ blogs and see what they want to make of this year.  See what they have been learning and doing so far this year, too.  Come back regularly to find out about all the great things 2019 will have in store for them. Happy New Year!

Blogging is a new experience for all of us in Room 2B.  We know that we will naturally get better the more we write and post.  But we also know that we can improve even more if we look back at our posts, set some expectations, and write goals to help us meet those expectations.  After some great thinking on the part of the boys and girls about what we should expect to do when blogging, each student looked back at their previous posts and set a personal goal for how they want to improve.  We hope when you read our latest blogs you see reflections of these goals and see some of the ways we are growing as writers and bloggers.

Write every day.  That’s what “they” say, right?  Our students should be writing every day. I agree. And in fact, my students have always written everyday.  They write answers to questions about the books we read.  They write words that contain the phonics patterns we study.  They write stories, and they write down notes as they research, read, and learn from other authors.

The problem: the majority of this writing stays crammed in their desks.  Imagine if there was a way to connect the writing they are already doing every day to others? What might happen if their ideas and their writing get shared with their parents long before that overly crammed backpack comes home at the end of the year? What if they could share their ideas and experiences with other students in our district, state, country, or from all around the world? As a wise student told me, if we put all of these great ideas together, we can make one big awesome idea.  Could this awesome idea help build empathy? Solve problems? Have a lasting impact? That’s what we want to find out.

My friend and mentor, Mrs. Campbell, and I are excited, and a little bit nervous, to use blogging as our way to dig our second graders’ ideas out of the recesses of their desks, and share them with the world.  Soon you will be able to not just follow my journey through this exciting experiment, but also follow each of their unique learning journeys through second grade.  Together let’s watch them grow as readers and writers, and get the chance to see first-hand just what can happen when learners get connected outside of their classroom walls!

Parents, teachers, instructional coaches, administrators…If you have experience blogging with primary students, I would love to hear!