Fairy Tales & Other Learning

This week, we kicked off a huge fairy tale unit in second grade!  During this unit, we will be reading and analyzing fairy tales.  We have been reading, watching, and listening to many fairy tales to really build our schema about how these stories are written.  In particular, we are investigating fairy tales for common elements.

Fairy Tale Elements

In addition to providing great opportunities for retelling, summarizing, and identifying the main idea of stories, this unit teaches students to analyze story plot, and to compare two versions of the same story written by different authors.

After we explore several different versions of Cinderella from diverse cultures and perspectives, we will compare their settings, characters, and beginning, middle, and end for differences and similarities.  Then, students will read and analyze several versions of other common fairy tales in book clubs.  They will present their findings to the class, and write an opinion telling us which version they thought was the best.

Finally, students will get an opportunity to apply these understandings, writing their very own fractured fairy tales.  Our final products will display our knowledge of fairy tale elements, story structure, character development, and writing craft!  This is such a great literacy project to end the year.

Other Learning

In math, we are building off our two digit addition knowledge to solve three digit addition (with and without regrouping) using decomposing. Stay tuned for an update when we post Educreations showing off our new skills!

In addition, we are continuing to build our comfort with time and money.  In second grade, students should be able to tell time to the nearest five minutes, and solve simple word problems involving change.

In science, we began a unit exploring how organisms interact with the environment with our own Worm Tub!  Stay tuned for a post on what we are learning through these wriggly creatures.

In Writing, we are beginning to write our Expert Projects (see previous posts).

In Word Study, we are concluding our parts of speech unit with Adverbs! Next week, we will review nouns, proper nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs.  Mad Libs, anyone?