How I Entertained My Second Graders This Year

     My third year of teaching this year was a challenge. After two years of teaching 6th grade intensive reading, I decided to focus on elementary (something close to my heart). Before the summer of 2014 ended, I was hired as a second grade teacher. This year was kind of like pushing the restart button in my teacher career because it felt as though I was experiencing First Year of Teaching 2.0. There were a lot of things I had to relearn. One of the things I wanted to do differently than the previous two years was to make my classroom more entertaining. This post is to share a few ways I made my classroom entertaining while also controlling classroom behavior. 

Gonoodle - https://www.gonoodle.com/

Gonoodle is a web site where the teacher can sign up for free and use activities on the web site whenever the teacher feels the class needs a brain break. Click here to read about 5 ways you can use Gonoodle in the classroom. Once signed up, the teacher creates a class and chooses a class "monster" to be the mascot. I allowed the kids to choose the class monster. Every activity earns your class a point, and every 10 points the class monster grows from a little kiddie monster to an adult monster. The kids love watching the monster grow. Once the monster grows into an adult, you have to restart whole process again with a new class monster. The activities aren't long. Some last from 1 minute to 5 minutes. Some of the activities are geared toward calming the student down with breathing exercises, or build their self-esteem with positive sayings. Other activities work on body movements through dancing or exercises. The whole point to the activities is to get the kids moving so that they get the "wiggles" out of them so that they can concentrate during the lesson. I really love using this web site, and I can't wait to use it again in the coming fall with my new second graders.

 

ClassDojo - https://www.classdojo.com/

ClassDojo is a free web site where the teacher can keep track of a child's behavior. I mainly used it as a points system for rewards. However, you can also keep track of behaviors (both positive and negative). There's options to send home progress reports for behavior, or send home parent log-ins so that parents can set up an account (free) and view their child's behavior for the day. Parents can even write notes on the web site and send it to the teacher. Students can set up their own account with their own log-ins and change their avatars. One of the main thing to do is create a class (similar to Gonoodle), and then add your students' names and choose an avatar for each one. Then, you have the option to add new positive behaviors or add new negative behaviors along with those already provided. When a student does something relating to any of the added behaviors (both positive and negative), the teacher can click on the student's name and choose that behavior. I used it as a way to get other students to follow examples of those who were doing what I wanted them to do. I chose a kid doing good behavior and I gave them a point by choosing one of the positive behaviors. There were moments when I would also see a student who didn't follow rules and I would choose their name and choose a negative behavior which deducted points from them. Both ways got their attention and corrected behaviors. I really like this web site because it helped me keep track of points and it helped with classroom management. Students liked earning points because it meant they were closer to reaching the number which allowed to go to the treasure box. I first started the points system small (5 points) and eventually worked my way up to a big number (20 points) as the year progressed. My kids made sure I knew who had reached the points that allowed others to go to the treasure box.

Storyline Online - http://www.storylineonline.net/

Storyline Online is a web site where each classic story is read by famous celebrities. Each story is mixed with illustrations and music as the actor/actress reads the story to the audience. My students enjoyed hearing the stories read to them by a famous person. 

Honorable Mention:

TumbleBooks - http://www.tumblebooklibrary.com/

TumbleBooks is one of my favorite web sites that I used a lot this year. It contains many stories that reads aloud while showing the text and illustrations. The kids found it very entertaining. I also liked it because the books are Accelerated Readers (A.R.). Students could take A.R. tests after reading and listening to the stories (at least three times each). I was very fortunate that my district has a subscription, otherwise a teacher would need to have a subscription in order to use TumbleBooks.

Checking Out Classroom Library Books

     Since the first week of school, I have had students wanting to take home books from my classroom library. In the beginning, getting use to being a first-year teacher and all of my other obligations as the teacher, I simply told the students to just get a piece of paper and write their name, book title, and the due date...Since things have begun to calm down, I found a nice check-out sheet form from Innovative Creations and I have made a binder with the free sheets from that web site. In addition, I made my own checkout slips in which the students will keep with them. Below is the image of the slips I made, using Microsoft Word as my tool.

Working with Sight Words

     Back when I was tutoring a second grader for a semester, one of the things I chose to concentrate with the student was Fry Sight Words. I used several approaches, such as making flash cards and playing a matching game, or doing a Word Point strategy that I saw on the web. One time, I actually had the words on PowerPoint slides and had the student read the words to me. Well, I was recently looking through some of my old assignments and I discovered the PowerPoint. I thought it would be interesting if I placed those slides into Movie Maker and make a video out of the slides, because I believe it's still a useful tool for teaching students sight words. This was the finished product:

     Moreover, here's the video of the Word Point strategy that I saw on the web and incorporated into my lessons both during my tutoring sessions in 2010 and during my student teaching last fall. When I did this with second graders, I made it seem like a game (just being enthused and encouraging those in my group to participate and earn tickets), so that's one way I differed my instruction from the one shown by the teacher in the video.

     In addition, there were other ways I worked with sight words with my second graders during my fall 2011 student teaching. SMART Exchange has a fun activity where students can click on the "cookies" and it reveals the hidden sight word for students to pronounce. I made it into a game where if the students pronounce a number of the words correctly, and without having to decode it (sound it out), then they earn tickets, which they could use towards the treasure box. Here's an example of the SMART Board activity that is used with the SMART Notebook software:

 

     Another engaging SMART Board activity (found within the SMART Notebook software) that can help teach sight words (or any kind of spelling/vocabulary word) is the Anagram tool, which allows the teacher to write in the specific words and it makes scrambled balls in which students can rearrange to spell a word. Here's an example of the anagram activity for the word "There":

     Well, these were just some ideas that I wanted to share about teaching sight words to students. I'm sure I'll come up with more ideas for sight words in the future!