Sneaking in a Little Curriculum with a Morning Greeting

We always start our day with a morning greeting. 

One at a time, the children shake hands and greet each other by name. Then they say something related to a given topic.

As we know, squeezing in enough time for everything is nearly impossible, so we squeeze in some learning any place we can! Time for social studies and science are especially strained, but we squeeze them in!

 

  

We all love starting our day with a morning greeting, and I usually try to squeeze in a learning concept while we greet each other. 

After a lesson on States of Matter the day before, they were asked to state something they remember from the lesson.

 

After working on the 4 kinds of sentences, I had them tell statements about themselves one day, then ask each other questions on another day. Their questions were priceless! (Some of their answers were even more priceless!)

 

For a writing project this week, they had to tell why their school was great. (We'll be writing opinion stories!)

 

I read an information book about Bats, so the next day they had to tell a fact they remembered about Bats. It was amazing what they remembered!

 

It's never tough to think of a topic, 

we just think about what we've been learning! 

Of course, sometimes we just have a fun question. 

 

Today we shared our favorite kind of ice cream!

A Fun Way to Review Basic Information

If you're not familiar with the game of Scoot, it's time you learned! It can be played with any type of task card that would have a quick answer,  

(There are other awesome types of task cards for skills that require more time and thinking, but that's not what Scoot is about!)  

Brain research suggests that including movement will help the brain function more efficiently. Scoot has the children moving from place to place, which not only gets the brain going, but it makes the whole thing more fun for the kids! Individual cards are placed throughout the classroom, and the children move from spot to spot, performing the task, recording the answer on their answer sheet, then moving onto the next card in the next part of the room when the teacher calls "Scoot"! After much scooting, the children return to their starting spot.

For more about how Scoot works, see THIS BLOG POST.

I've used these with small groups and large groups. Sometimes you can take a few cards, have a handful of kids scoot through those, and save the rest of the cards in the series for another day.

The kids love Scoot! It's a great way to add fun to a review that can be rather mundane, like parts of speech or vowel sounds.  Yet, these things need to be practiced so these skills are strengthened.

A couple of years ago, I spent some time making several sets of Task Cards that are perfect for Scoot playing. I've spent the last couple of days updating these sets.

Social Studies Review: Scoot or Task Cards is a collection of questions on mapping and general Social Studies knowledge.  It can be played as a Scoot game, or just individual task cards. I made it to review end-of-the-year second-grade skills, but have heard that it's great review for older children as well!  See the image below to download this freebie.

Another product in this series, Vocabulary Review: Scoot or Task Cards gives the children vocabulary practice and review with prefixes, suffixes, antonyms and synonyms. (See image for link.)

Mathematics Review: Scoot orTask Cards reviews time, money, place value, measurement, story problems and fact families. (See image for link.)

Language Review: Scoot or Task Cards practices parts of speech:  nouns, proper nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. (See image for link.)

Phonics Review: Scoot or Task Cards practice vowel sounds: short vowels, long vowels, r-controlled vowels, and vowel teams. (See image for link.)

Science Review: Scoot or Task Cards reviews all sorts of beginning science concepts: five senses, basic biology, chemistry, astronomy, plants, and weather.

Plus, I have a set that bundles all 6 sets!  Combined Review- Word Work, Math, Science and Social Studies: Scoot or Task Cards gives you weeks worth of review activities for all subjects! This is a fun way to spend those last few weeks when the children just can't sit still and have lost their attention spans, or a great way to start the year, making sure they have the background knowledge they need.

But there's even more good news: All these items are available digitally with Boom Learning!

 These are perfect for end-of-the-year review, summer practice, or back-to-school reviewing basic concepts. They're appropriate for grades 2, 3, or 4!

Sentences, With a Halloween Twist

My students have been learning the four kinds of sentences. 

They're getting pretty good at naming the 4 kinds (Statement, Question, Command, Exclamation) and can easily identify that they all should begin with a capital and end with punctuation. 

However, when I say a sentence (or when they read one) they're still working at figuring out what kind of sentence it is. So I decided to take matters into my own hands, in a fun way, with a Halloween Twist!

I made this activity with lots of sentences of each kind.  Of course, each of the sentences has something to do with Halloween!  I used mostly Dolch words, but I added some of their favorite Halloween words.  (They always remember those, don't they?)

Halloween Sentence Reading Practice

I made some sorting cards, with reminders of each kind of sentence, along with 28 sentences.  I also added a few other activities to do with the same sentences, based on the Common Core for grades 2 and 3 including realistic or fantasy and complete sentence or sentence fragment. I think they're going to love it!  

Here's a little movie to give you an idea how it's used!

The children will be having so much fun, they won't even realize they're practicing important reading and sentence skills!