Tuesday January 30th was my last day in the grade 2 in-situ class. I’m a bit sad about this as this is the class who I will be doing my practicum with, and I found it really beneficial to get to know the students some more and also learn from my mentor teacher. I look forward to spending more time with the class before my practicum begins. Bellow I will be summarizing the morning activities the students did along with some photos and also the curriculum connections.

Firstly in the morning when the students arrive they do their “morning work,” this is a soft start activity to give them something to do (and learn) to calm down and get prepared for the day. I also like that it gives the teacher time to get prepared or deal with children who need some extra support in the morning. Something I also liked about this was that the students are encouraged to complete the questions, however if they finish early they can colour on the back for the rest of the time. Morning work is usually around 10-15 minutes, and when everyone is calm and ready they join the teacher at the carpet and go through the questions as a class to make sure they are on the right track with their answers. On the grade 2 curriculum morning work fits in with computational fluency, measurement, writing conventions, and letter formation.

After morning work, the kids then had their morning meeting. The special helper gets to do the calendar and weather report. The morning message is written on the eisel and the students work on topics from the curricular content English Language Arts 2 including letter formation, sentence structure, and conventions. In my opinion I think one of the curriculum competencies that fit best with morning meeting is, “Use developmentally appropriate reading, listening, and viewing strategies to make meaning” as each applies to what the kids are doing during this time.

After morning meeting the kids then worked on lesson #45 of the UFLI program. Some valuable information I found out was that it is ok if you don’t complete the entire lesson and sometimes they take more than one day to complete. Especially with this group of students, their attention spans last for about 15 minutes and then it’s important for them to get a movement break. As indicated on the picture above the students were learning about “sh” words. The students used white boards and changed words with one letter and were asked to come up with their own “sh” word at the end. In this lesson I think this UFLI lesson would be connected to “word patterns and word families” under content and a Big Idea could be “Playing with language helps us discover how language works.”

Here is a student example of what the activity was.

The last activity of the day was reading the story “Imagine a Night.” It was a beautiful story and the illustrations were also beautiful too. Before reading the story the students were asked what they thought the story might be about based on the cover of the book and it was great to see how their imaginations became so big! The teacher would step every couple of pages to asked the students what they thought was going on or what was going to happen (foreshadowing) and also they were asked to look closely at the pictures to gain a sense of what might be happening. I noticed the English Language Arts curriculum really promotes stories, reading and story based learning in general which I am excited about as there are so many ways stories can be tied into each subject. I also liked how she finished the lesson with a story as I found the kids were engaged but it also calmed them down as well. In the curriculum a big idea for this story could be “Stories and other texts connect us to ourselves, our families, and our communities.” As well as “Use personal experience and knowledge to connect to stories and other texts to make meaning” under competencies and “elements of a story” and “reading strategies” under content.