No Time for Handwriting

Hi!  I am Michelle from Teach123.  Jennifer asked me to be a guest blogger today.

Do you feel like you never have enough time to teach handwriting?  Do you look at your students' assignments and feel they need handwriting lessons? Try this!  Once a week during reading group,  my students practice their word wall words/spelling words. I use dry erase boards with the lines with the dotted middle line. Each time I say the word all the students write the word. The person who writes it using the lines and spaces correctly, correct letter formation, and spelled correctly earns a B.U.G. (my incentive program). So, if all 6 students write the word neatly and spelled correctly, all the them earn a B.U.G. (ticket with a picture of a Bug) I think because it's not a contest to see who can write it the fastest and they have to write using correct letter formation, it has improved their handwriting.  It kind of like killing two birds with one stone!

B.U.G.  stands for Being Unusually Good.  From time to time I pass out this ticket when students are B.U.G.  They never know when I will be watching to pass out a B.U.G. for work habits and behavior so they need to do their best ALL the time.

Click here to get your FREE copy of the B.U.G. system:

Second Grade Common Core Curriculum Map Book Study: The Pacing Guide

We are at the end of our book study!  Boo Hoo!

 Below is a thumbnail of the book.  Many teachers across the country are using this book to make sure that we are all on the same page.  The curriculum map focused on here was developed by the writers of the common core and a team of teachers.  If you want to purchase this book, just click on the book below and go to Amazon.  

So far you have had an overview of the book and summaries of the six units for second grade:

Unit 1:  A Season for Chapters (Best Practices 4 Teachers)

Unit 2:  The Wild West (Teach123)

Unit 3:  Building Bridges with Unlikely Friends (Elementary Matters)

Unit 4:  A Long Journey to Freedom (Mandy's Tips for Teachers)

Unit 5:  Hand-Me-Down Tales from Around the World (Sassy in Second)

Unit 6:  Taking Care of Ourselves (Teach123)

And now you have ended up back where you sort of started with me as we talk about the Pacing Guide that is included in the book.  The pacing guide gives us first hand guidance on how to differentiate standards 2.3 and 2.3 the Common Core Standards.  These two standards deal mostly with the word work and vocabulary areas of literacy. The standards are 'divided' into six levels <1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6>.  Here is an example from pg 6847 if you are using a kindle--I let one of our reading trainers borrow my book so I am going with the Kindle version tonight!

Reading Foundations 2.3

Level 1:  Sweep for phrases to build fluency.  Identify phrases that are common to readers and which use sight words and nouns for visualization.

Level 2:  Read a common text at 95% <poem or lyrics> chorally.

Level 3:  Read a text at 95% while being timed.  Record and listen for accuracy.

Level 4:  Use common suffixes, contractions, and increase the number of known sight words.

Level 5:  Read common prefixes, make distinctions between homophones, identify the number of syllables in a word, and increase the number of known sight words.

Level 6:  Fluently read multi-syllabic words using prefixes and suffixes, use vowel groupings not common to most words such as eigh, ough, ei, etc., increase the number of known sight words to read fluently.

The downside of this is that standards 2.3 and 2.4 are the only standards that are broken down to show differentiation.  So....it is left to us to figure out how to differentiate all of the others!  No small task, huh?  

If any of you are inclined to break the standards down to differentiate them and want to share, I would be glad to post them for you.  I think it would be great if we had a database differentiated standards!  Maybe a job for the summer?  Meanwhile...you can use this to begin the process of differentiation!

I hope you have enjoyed doing this book study with us!  If any of us that participated can be of help to you, please feel free to send us a message!