Learning Lessons With Amy Labrasciano: connections between events

Click here to learn all about teaching ELA in the 2nd grade classroom. These free and fun lesson outlines will detail curriculum and ideas for all informational, literature and writing standards in my elementary classroom. Your second grade students will love the lessons and activities shared here. These lesson outlines are added and updated almost each week.

Every teacher knows that this week has the kids acting a little bonkers. You'll notice that while my lessons all have a Halloween theme, they would work for classrooms that don't address Halloween with the exception of Big Pumpkin and Happy Haunting. You could just switch out the titles if you prefer. I'm super excited that I spent the beginning of the year building up student's reading foundations because we are starting Monday with the entire plot of the story. Students will get into coding the text with the different parts and even have conversations about the author's point including the lesson/central message. The fact that they can do this efficiently in a 20-30 period of time is awesome! Tuesday's lessons is all about Mary Shelley who had a rough childhood which she overcame to become an infamous author. Students will connect events in her life to choices and other events. In case you don't know, I'm a HUGE Pumpkin Jack fan. It is a realistic fiction book that follows a boy and his pumpkin through the pumpkin's entire life cycle. We will put a pumpkin outside the following day and watch it decompose and sprout a pumpkin patch. If you want to see detailed lessons on Pumpkin Jack visit here. Thursday and Friday focus on fun, engaging simple text. Students are not going to be at their finest and I would rather see them accomplish something rather than nothing.

Just like reading, I feel like we've turned a big corner in writing. We are taking our first standardizes writing assessment and really editing it. We'll only be focusing on contrasting to start. Once they have mastered certain crafts and structure we will add to the standard with comparing too.

If you are interested in the Frankenstein and Mary Shelley text that I'm using, you can click below to see it in my store.

My lesson plan templates come from A Modern Teacher. If you want to find the first in my lesson outlines click here.

Hi everyone! I'm so sorry for missing the last two weeks. We had a horrible hurricane and I couldn't post my lesson outlines. The good news is that I'm back, and I may say this all the time, but next week is going to be so much fun!! I'm a huge proponent of engaging lessons that meet the student's needs while helping them to grow as learners. I'm also a sucker for thematic lesson plans and next week is a must for my students - Apple Week. Don't you find great joy in teaching fun topics?

Before we start talking shared reading, let me tell you about a couple of activities that we'll be doing. We will be sampling yummy crockpot applesauce. Of course I don't have the time to make it from scratch so I use jarred applesauce and warm it before the students arrive. They have never figured it out and I hope you don't tell them! We'll sample different varieties of apples and graph our favorites. We'll sample some apple candy and for incentives I'll pass out Apple Jacks. We'll also have a basket full of fun apple books.

The standard that we will be learning is a little more challenging than others, but still very engaging and interesting to students. We'll be taking a look at how events can connect through history and science. In order to do this, we'll look at John Chapman's life. The students will determine what each event causes later in John's lifetime. For example, it is believed that many apple orchards exist because of John's work. Without his travels we would not have had so many crabapples. We'll also be taking a look at how apples can add nutrition to our diets, the pollination process and the apple lifecycle. Just think of a time line and lifecycle wheel.

Once again writing will be an extension of our shared reading plans. Each day we'll be writing an informative piece on an apple page. When the students are done they we have an awesome apple book. Just look at it below!

I am super excited to give my students independent workstation materials that couple so well with our shared reading and writing. These centers will center around the five core components of reading: phonics, phonemes, fluency, vocabulary and comprehension. I've spent a lot of time trying to create materials that work for each student, are engaging, purposeful and self explanatory. Thank goodness I finally figured it out. Click on the image below to find the unit.

To find the other materials that I used in these lesson outlines, click on the links below.