Vocabulary Development Song

As you may know, we are doing a weather unit in Grade 2 this term for science. I found this great idea in Building Vocabulary with Familiar Songs. Click on the pic to check it out at Amazon.

It takes everyday songs that our kiddos are bound to know and uses them to build vocabulary. One song it uses is The Itsy Bitsy Spider. I've typed it up because part of the Word Bank title got cut off on the photocopier. Because of copyright, I can't share it here but thought you might like to check it out and perhaps use the same idea with poems or songs that you use in class.

I'll be doing this one with my kiddos later this week after we learn about the water cycle (so they can confidently choose 'evaporation' and 'precipitation' to replace 'dried up' and 'rain'). 

I've added this as part of A Day in First Grade's poetry linky part (it's a song, not a poem, but I still think it's a great idea you can use with poems!). Check it out here

5x Language Arts Dominoes

I've just uploaded a new Language Arts Dominoes pack to TpT and Teachers Notebook. This pack includes 5 sets of dominoes for language arts - perfect for centers, work stations or rotations. I have used them for Expanding Vocabulary games for the Daily 5 which I sometimes use as part of Word Work for my higher students and during Writing Workshop and for grammar activities.

The dominoes sets you get are:
1. Antonyms
2. Synonyms
3. Homophones
4. Contractions
5. Compound words

I've also included a label to add to a zip-lock bag to store the contractions in or add to the top of a pile and secure with a rubber band.

My class absolutely love dominoes - we have a number of sets for English and Math. What I love about them is that once they know how to play, I only need a minimal introduction for each new set! Saves heaps of time explaining new activities and games!

Here's a screenshop of 2 pages for homophones and contractions: 

Students play just like they do normal dominoes - they match one side of a domino with the matching side of another. 

For a limited time only I've got this pack on sale! Check it out at TpT and Teachers Notebook!

Freebie: Similes Poster

This week my class has been working on similes. We read the book Quick as a Cricket on YouTube - I've now ordered a book from Amazon! The kids absolutely loved it!

Here's a little poster I did up for when I introduced similes in case you could use it.

My students have had a blast writing similes about themselves to create a booklet. We've tried to add more description to our similes. For example, we thought the simile 'Busy as a bee' was quite boring and so they came up with ones like 'as busy as a hive of bees', 'as busy as a buzzing, bumblebee' (this will be a good one when we look more at alliteration and onamatopeia in the coming weeks!) and lots of others for their own and well-known similes. They are using pastels to record and illustrate their books ending with 'Put them altogether and you've got me' - just like in Quick as a Cricket.

We are then each choosing our favourite simile and illustrating it on a larger piece of paper to create a class book titled '2A are as wise as owls'. They are having heaps of fun working on these projects. I'll get some pics when they're done.

For some of my lower and special needs kids, I used this pdf from KidzClub to help them to form their similes. They really enjoyed this. I just printed, cut, laminated and cut out the pictures and labels. I have it available for all kids when they finish set tasks and it has been very popular! A few were even playing with it during Golden Time today (free time on a Friday afternoon that has been earned by the whole class). 

In our class Similes are like a cold, refreshing drink on a sweltering Summer day - we just can't get enough!