Wow...have I been M.I.A...Doesn't the end of school just kill you? I know I am shot! So much to still accomplish and not enough time!
I wanted to just let you know about how my year went implementing Pearson's Reading Street Program !
This was my second year doing Reading Street (2011 Series), and I thought it went really well. The first year I was just getting to know the program and how to implement all that was in the program. I quickly found out that...I couldn't implement it all :) LOL So I looked at what was most important and made the program my own and work for my students and my style of teaching. In the beginning, I felt that it stifled my creativity, but once I had my feet wet I added my creativity right back into the program.
Below are just some of the things that I did for some of the stories:
The Twin Club - I decided to connect it to our Social Studies unit on communities to make it more of an interdisciplinary unit and we made a Rural, Urban and Suburban Communities Lapbook...
Exploring Space with an Astronaut - We created a Space Flip-Flap Book that aligned with the comprehension questions for the story and ate Astronaut ice cream! We compared it to regular ice cream by doing a taste test and making a pictograph of our results! Then the students wrote a comparison paragraph about the ice cream taste test! It was soooooo much fun!!!!
Henry and Mudge and the Starry Night - We did an expository/sequencing writing activity on making s'mores :) We didn't actually make the s'mores this year but I plan on doing that next year!!! We also learned about the moon during Science...so next year I am going to do our moon unit during Henry and Mudge :) We made Moon Flip-Flap Books so I am going to make these when we do Henry and Mudge!
A Walk in the Desert - I actually thought my students were going to be bored to tears with this story and it was one of their favorites..isn't that funny! We learned about the desert and the saguaro cactus! One of my students went to the botanical gardens and was teaching his parents all about cactuses and he brought one into school to show the class! I just love when their learning extends outside the classroom. We decided to write expository paragraphs about the Saguaro Cactus and put our details on a cactus cut out! We wrote a topic sentence, supporting details, and a conclusion on the cut-outs and adhered them to a cactus! It looked adorable on the bulletin board :)
The Strongest One - We didn't do any type of craftivity with this story but I had my students act it out in groups. They loved it!!!
So this is what I did for Unit 1 in Reading Street this year! I will continue to add the different activities that I added to each unit in future blog posts :) I hope this was helpful to you if you adopted Pearson's Reading Street Program :)
If you are interested in doing some of these activities, I have added the unit to my TPT store :)
Hugs,
Labels: flip-flap books, Pearson Reading Street, Reading, second grade
