I am supposed to be on holiday, however today I run into some photographs and scans I had made of my second grade notebooks and thought I should share them with you. On Vocabulary That Sticks I wrote about the way my students tried to internalise and retain new vocabulary. One of the most difficult things for beginner learners is to take that vocabulary and use it into meaningful sentences. As I have mentioned before our focus this year was not correct production but recognition of words and their function within sentences.
My second grade students used their notebooks for this. To begin with we used the new words we learnt in funny sentences, that sometimes even made no sense. The point was for the children to get used to the sound of the word and locate it in relation to other, unknown words in a sentence. I loved the way they painstakingly wrote in the little notebooks, depicting what they wrote . Here are a few samples:
We then moved form writing simple sentences to alphabetical order exercises and simple question formation.
We also used our writing to help us improve our reading skills. It was really rewarding for them to be able to read something they wrote on their own.
When it comes to reading skills I think that simple emergent readers and picture books created by me or by the children on their own helped a lot. I created the What is Blue? reader exactly for this purpose. Here are a few sample of the picture class books we used this year.
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| What Begins with A? Click Here for a copy of this reader. |
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| The Days of the Week |
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| Counting Fish |
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| Our Classroom Rules! Come Prepared to Learn. |
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| Our Classroom Rules: Keep your desk tidy. |
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| Our Classroom Rules! Raise Your Hand To Speak. |
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| Our Classroom Rules! Don't talk when someone else is talking. |
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| Our Colours! |
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| What Is Blue? Click Here for a printable copy of this reader. |
