Clair Hoey's List: Common Core - Second Grade

Read-aloud sessions with emergent readers encourage learning and are one of the best ways to ensure later reading success. Historical fiction helps students learn about the past and connect it to their own lives. This lesson for first- and second-grade students features two read-aloud sessions of a picture book adapted from Little House in the Big Woods by Laura Ingalls Wilder. A picture-walk preview invites students to make predictions about the characters and plot, and leads to a definition and discussion of historical fiction and memoir. Following the read-aloud, students hear some background information about the author, and compare these facts with situations and events in the story. In a second class session, discussion helps students compare the characters and events in the book with people and experiences in their own lives; students then create a T-chart to record their comparisons.

This lesson gives second-grade students opportunities to interact with a thought-provoking story, as they also develop comprehension and critical-thinking skills. Students begin by listening to a read-aloud of Amazing Grace by Mary Hoffman, with teacher modeling of the thinking process at key points. They then participate in partner, small-group, and whole-class discussions to revisit and respond to the text. Students finish by using the interactive Doodle Splash to visually represent the ideas they want to remember from the book. Helpful tips are embedded within the lesson for discussing difficult themes and guiding students to make respectful and thoughtful comments in a group setting.

These activities provide a foundation for using nonfiction resources for developing and answering questions about gathered information. Using a wide variety of nonfiction literature, students learn to sort and categorize books to begin the information-gathering process. Then, working with partners and groups, using pictures and text, students are guided through the process of gathering information, asking clarifying questions, and then enhancing the information with additional details. Students complete the lesson by collaboratively making “Question and Answer” books for the classroom library. This is a high-interest foundation builder for using nonfiction literature in research as well as for pleasure reading.

Beginning writers find electronic communication highly engaging, and educators recognize the power of e-mail as a tool for literacy learning. E-mail is well-suited to teaching audience awareness—recognizing what readers need to know to understand a reply message and using the reply function as a way to contextualize a reply and help readers make sense of it. In this lesson, the teacher models replying to an e-mail message, pointing out the information that is automatically contained in such a reply, and students compose their own replies to an e-mail from the teacher. They explore when replying to all is a useful option, how leaving the original message can help to clarify a reply, and the importance of a specific subject in an e-mail. By comparing, sending and receiving e-mail replies, students explore issues of reply format and content with audience needs and expectations in mind.

Foregrounding scientific vocabulary, this integrated lesson invites students to research worms in order to create a classroom habitat. Students are first introduced to inquiry notebooks and then use them record what they already know about worms. Next, students observe the cover of a fiction book about worms and make a hypothesis on whether the book is fact or fiction, and then check their hypotheses after the book is read aloud. Next, after an introduction to related scientific words such as hypothesis, habitat, attribute, predator, and prey, students conduct and record research and findings in their inquiry notebooks. Once they have gathered the necessary information, students plan and build a worm habitat, which becomes the springboard for further scientific exploration, observation, and experimentation.

Stories and poems that have a familiar structure can create a supportive context for learning about the writing process, building students' background knowledge, and scaffolding their creation of original stories. In this lesson for students in second or late first grade, teachers help students explore the concepts of beginning, middle, and ending by reading a variety of stories and charting the events on storyboards. As they retell the stories, students are encouraged to make use of sequencing words (first, so, then, next, after that, finally). A read-aloud of Once Upon a Golden Apple by Jean Little and Maggie De Vries introduces a discussion of the choices made by an author in constructing a plot. Starting with prewriting questions and a storyboard, students construct original stories, progressing from shared writing to guided writing; independent writing is also encouraged.

Your students will learn to think globally and act locally by participating in the Internet-based Earth Day Groceries Project. Students look at the work of children around the world and talk about what environmental messages are important to communicate. They then design paper bags that convey their ideas. The bags are distributed at local grocery stores on April 22nd, Earth Day. When the project is complete, students can share their work online. Although this lesson is intended for students in kindergarten through second grade, it can easily be adapted and makes an excellent school- or district-wide project.

This lesson is designed to help first- and second-grade students learn new vocabulary by taking them on virtual adventures that replicate field trips. Students begin by accessing prior knowledge through an initial writing activity. Ensuing discussions, read-alouds, and the creation of a picture dictionary "take students to the moon," while further building their vocabulary. Students use an online Alphabet Organizer to complete a final writing activity, which they compare to the writing they did during the first session. Although this lesson focuses on the moon, its activities can be used with any content area topic.

Science field journals have been in use for many, many years. In fact, Lewis and Clark were asked to keep a field journal by President Thomas Jefferson. Their journals included detailed observations of the land, plants, and animals they saw. This lesson plan invites students to observe and explore their environment in much the same way. After being introduced to both gardens and field journals by reading picture books, students work together to plant a garden and study its growth using the inquiry process of questioning and exploring. As they research and study, students record their observations in a field journal, to be shared with others—just like Lewis and Clark!

This games provides practice in phonological awareness with beginning sounds.

From PBS the Quiet Machine develops a student phonological awareness skills of beginning sounds.

PBS LearningMedia™ is the go-to destination for instant access to tens of thousands of classroom-ready, digital resources including videos, games, audio clips, photos, lesson plans, and more! You can search, save, and share with ease. Best of all, PBS LearningMedia is free for educators.

Although this site does have items for sale, it also has free little books, poetry and links to other good resources.

Six lesson that support narrative writing.

This lesson focuses on a “learn by doing” series of reading and writing activities designed to teach research strategies. The activity uses KWL charts and interactive writing as key components of organizing information. As a class, students list what they know about insects, prompted by examining pictures in an insect book. Students them pose questions they have about insects, again using picture books as a visual prompt. Students then search for answers to the questions they have posed, using Websites, read-alouds, and easy readers. Periodic reviews of gathered information become the backdrop to ongoing inquiry, discussion, reporting, and confirming information. The lesson culminates with the publishing of a collaborative question and answer book which reports on information about the chosen topic, with each student contributing one page to the book.

This lesson describes small-group, guided writing lessons, which are taught in four steps for students who are in need of extra support. Students learn how to communicate information of interest, stimulated by discussion of Nicola Davies' Bat Loves the Night and several websites. Students learn three sets of strategies for writing: (1) engaging in writing with fluent, sustained attention, (2) writing informative titles, and (3) adding enough information to communicate clearly.

This lesson focuses on reading comprehension skills as they apply to mathematics story problems, as well as on written and verbal mathematics communication skills. Working as a class, students read a story problem and answer a series of questions designed to bring out the essential points of the problem. Students then draw a picture on chart paper showing the details of the story problem. They write both an equation and a sentence to represent the problem. Finally, students repeat the process with new problems, working in small groups to create posters using images, text, and mathematical equations to represent a story problem.

These exemplars contain full materials for two to five lessons each, including:
Readings with teacher and student instructions
Text dependent questions
Student discussion activities
Vocabulary and syntax tasks for challenging words and phrases
Writing-based formative assesments
Fiction and nonfiction lessons, searchable by grade levels.

Rain, ice, and steam—water takes on all three forms as it moves between the land, the ocean, and the atmosphere. In this unit of study, first and second grade students discover the repetitive topic of water. Read-alouds of several books related to the theme are used to introduce the topic of rain, and several hands-on experiments and classroom centers teach students about the water cycle and how it functions. After exploring the different parts of the water cycle, students demonstrate the knowledge they have gained by working in groups to write and perform a play.

This research project is designed for primary students to engage in nonfiction text, in both print and digital format. Students begin by formulating questions on a subject (in this case, weather), then classify questions into topic areas. After grouping students by topic areas and assigning a question previously generated, students engage in nonfiction text to answer the question. Combining question with answer, students construct sentences that are then combined with others in their topic group to form a "report" (paragraph length). The group then creates an illustration to reflect the topic and publishes it in the chosen format (print or digital).