Fables -- Ireland

We moved to Irish folktales. In our nonfiction study of Ireland, one of the folktales that we learned about at National Geographic for Kids was Finn McCoul. So we started with him. Our big standard in CCSS was to recount stories, including fables and folktales, and determine their central message or moral, so our objective in most of the lessons with just that, finding the moral of the story. After that we read Jamie O'Rourke and the Giant Potatoe. While we were reading both the students would rate themselves on the objective and then take notes about the book. I told them I wanted them to think about the objective, but also any thing that made a lightbulb in their reading brain. (At the beginning of the year we discussed how we had a reading brain that would talk to us. It was like a light bulb...lightbulbs don't make any noise but you know they are there)

 
Finally, we ended up with Jaime O'Rouke and the Pooka. We followed the same pattern that we have for the previous books. The kids were taking notes while I was reading. At the end of the reading they got several minutes to finish writing down whatever they were working on, then they were able to share with a partner what they were thinking. Finally we shared out whole group.

We were about at the end of study of Ireland and it was almost St.Patrick's day, so we learned about the real St. Patrick. We started with an anticipation guide and then took notes while we read Gail Gibbon's St. Patrick's Day and watch Brain Pop. At the end they shared. One little boy was making connections between St. Patrick and Harriet Tubman. He was taking about how Patrick and Harriet Tubman were both slaves and came back to their home to try and free people.

Stone Soup

We recently started our 5th unit in the new CCSS. It is all about fables and folktales from all different parts of the world. We started with all the different varieties of Stone Soup.

We read the orginal Stone Soup and began our study. The CCSS says 2nd graders should.."Compare and contrast two or more versions of the same story by different authors or from different cultures." So we created a table and used that information to compare the different versions of the story. Some of the information that we put on the table also corresponds to CCSS " Describe the overall structure of a story,"  We put our lessons in a smartboard file. We also talked about all the different countries that the different versions of stone soup has come from. At the end as a piece of assessment we created and used a venn diagram where they picked two of versions and discussed the similarities and differences.

We have been doing a lot with notebooks this year and had been taking notes on all the different versions, so the kids used the table I had discussed earlier to create their venn.  Another CCSS that we have been addressing in their unit is..." Write opinion pieces where they introduce a book, state an opinion, supply reasons to support that opinion, and provide a concluding statement or section." So after they had created their venn, they used that information again to write about their favorite one using an plan we created.