Our week on the moon and Earth

We teach thematically in our K-2 bilingual classrooms at our school.  I used to think thematic units were for pre-kinder and kindergarten, but with the success of last year I am sold!  That being said we are smack dab in the middle of our solar system unit.  The week before spring break we studied the sun, stars, and constellations in Spanish (we are continuing our studies of those topics in English this week).  The following week in Spanish we studied the moon and Earth.

Last week we started off Monday with an anticipatory sort with las fases de la luna (the phases of the moon) to see where the students were at in their knowledge of the moon phases.

Listening to the students work with their learning buddies was quite interesting.  The students all had a reason behind what they thought the moon phases should look like (putting like shapes together; starting off with a full moon and then it 'melts' away to nothing...), but none of them quite got it.

The point of the days activity wasn't to actually teach the moon phases, but an introduction to the idea.  Also, I wanted them to problem solve and figure out the pattern.  We had a lot of good discussions and I think from that point forward, I had them hooked!

 We continued with many more activities throughout our different subjects. Our dictado for the week included a bunch of our vocabulary words (along with our phonics skill - suffixes).  In writing we watched a video on Brainpop Español about la luna and we started writing our textos informativos (informative texts) with the information they we learned.

We did our texto informativo about the moon whole group, but next week they will be writing about the Earth on their own. We started adding their background knowledge for the writing by reading this book from Reading A-Z during Reading Workshop:

Click to go to the book

 (if you have an account, you can download for free!)

It was a really good, "funny," factual book.  The kids were so amazed by what they had learned and were spouting off facts to me all day:  "Teacher did you know that..."  {Um, yes, I was there.  I read the book.} Haha, no...  I was very enthusiastic with every fact they brought me.  Their excitement was contagious!  

Like I mentioned before we have a set of vocabulary that we learn with each week.  My poster isn't pretty, but it gets the job done.  The kids have their own versions in their notebooks. Next week we will bridge the vocabulary into English on the same page (different color).

I really like seeing the kids use the new vocabulary in their writing, so I had them write about what they learned about the moon and the Earth at the end of the week.  I was so surprised at the writing I got!  I challenged them to use as many vocabulary words that they got.   Probably one of my best pieces of the day came from one of my struggling readers...  I was such a proud teacher mama!

I will be honest though, it wasn't all Pulitzer Prize writing -- I had a couple who showed me, La luna es un planeta (The moon is a planet).  And that is fine -- they were showing me what they 'knew.'  It was a great time to have some mini-discussions and redirect their thoughts.  I really like teaching moments like those!

So that was our week in a shell.  This week we are moving on to the planets and astronauts, but we had a field trip on Monday and a half day on Friday - so this is going to be a tight squeeze!

What are you learning about this week!?

Spanish Phonics

In our bilingual classroom we don't "do" spelling tests.  There has been a lot of studies done that say that Spanish phonics skills are best learned through authentic writing activities, so even though we do a lot of isolated phonics practice throughout the week, we end the week with a final dictado for assessment.

This week the kids are learning about suffixes in Spanish (sufijos).  We have learned about different suffixes before this week, so I consider my kiddos experts (proud teacher mama, anyone?).  After the introduction to -able and -ible the kids did an entry in their interactive word work notebooks.  We always start off with a "title" to explain what the topic is about.  This time I left blanks for the students to show their learning.  

They know p-p-prefijos are at the p-p-principio so that means sufijos must be at the end.  Then we talked about how these suffixes can go at the end of a noun or verb to make a new word (an adjective).

They then put their page together.  They really are so good at following directions with their interactive notebooks.  They cut in the right places and glue in the right places...and believe me, it wasn't always like that, but I love that I can hand out the pieces to their notebooks and they are off and learning!

This time I provided the kids with a list of words to sort on their own.  Sometimes we do it whole group and I orally give them the words and sometimes they work on their own.  When they were done, they had to go back and highlight the sufijos in every word.

At this point of the year I still have kids who are at all different speeds of cutting...Some kids are wham and done and others, I look at the clock, and really?  15 minutes of just cutting?  So I had to come up with an activity for my early finishers.  I pulled out my sufijos center for next week.

A quick note on that.  As a school we had been seeing that these kids rock the phonics skill the week it is being taught, but then the benchmark test five weeks later, they are forgetting the skill.  So I decided to extend the lessons and the phonics center the following week reviews the skill.  That way we have all had a week practicing the skill and an extra week reinforces the skill.  So even though this is a literacy center the students will be doing next week in their small groups, they loved playing it early.

Tuesday is when I reveal the week's dictado.  I want to get more into what our dictados consist of in another post, but all of the markings on our SmartBoard are the students' observations.  So we definitely reinforce our phonics skill by finding the words in our dictado and we practice writing it in different ways throughout the week.

So that is Spanish fonética in a nutshell in our second grade bilingual classroom.  What do you do in your classroom?  I would love to hear some new ideas to use with my kiddos!