Parachutes, Solving a Mystery, and Informational/Explanatory Writing

  We have had another exciting week in second grade!

We made parachutes and dropped them from the 4th grade stairs.  This helped us see how the parachute trapped air to slow it down and land safely on the ground.  We dropped a ball and the parachute at the same time to contrast the rate of  speed.  We were able to figure out that the ball falls faster because it does not have anything to trap air.  

Great thinking 2nd graders!

Congratulations to Table 4!

Parachute Champions!

Next week we will begin learning about clouds and weather.  Get ready to have a mini weather forecaster at home!

On Thursday we finished our read-aloud book The Case of the Rock and Roll Dog.

We kept track of suspects and clues until the mystery was solved.  This was a great story to help us practice keeping track of information and putting pieces of information together.  

This week we learned a lot about information/explanatory writing (non-fiction).  We focused on the steps we need to follow before we can do any actual writing.

Can your child tell you the steps?  My fingers are crossed! :)

First we read the prompt.
Then we read the prompt again and analyze
the prompt.

When we analyze we look for 3 things:
T = Topic 
What are we writing about?
A= Audience
Who is going to read our writing?
K = Key Words
We underline or circle the key words to guide our brainstorming.

Then we stop and think for 90 seconds about the topic.
Yes...I time them!

After we think, we write down all of our ideas.
Next it is time to pick and choose our
Big Ideas.
Our Big Ideas must be:
Important
Different
and we must be able to
Elaborate

Now we are ready to plan.
This chart reminds us why we plan our writing.

This chart shows our planning rules.
Even when we become non-fiction writing "experts"
it is still necessary to plan.
We can't argue "I'm really good at it now so I don't need
to plan."

Finally we are ready to fill in our planning
sheet.  First we fill in the Big Ideas then
we fill in two Supporting Details for each big idea.

Next week we will begin learning about and writing 4 different types of topic sentences. 

Tune in next week for pictures of our topic sentence chart!

Have a wonderful weekend!