Happy Halloween everyone! You may have noticed that I haven't been posting my weekly ELA units the past few weeks.  That would be because I have been working on a Folktales MEGA unit !  We have been reading and studying Folktales in 2nd grade for the past 3 weeks, particularly Tall Tales, Fairy Tales and Fables.  I put all of the centers, graphic organizers, activities and resources together into one mega-pack! It has been such a fun three weeks since folktales are so much fun to read and talk about.  Besides the resources in this pack I have also been using the iReading 8 in 1 Fables app on my iPad which my kiddos love. It costs $1.99 on iTunes. It looks great projected on the SmartBoard and I love how it reads to you and includes a moral at the end of each story.  You may have also seen these super cute, Fairy Tales floating around Pinterest lately.  Scholastic Book Clubs has them in a Fractured Fairy Tale pack for $14 which I snagged for FREE using my points.  They are...
I have been all about the Monsters lately.  If you aren't allowed to celebrate Halloween at your school, monsters are a great way to spread a little spookiness without making them about Halloween.  We did a little monster fun today in writing and math.  I saw these pictures on Pinterest this summer and my mind was working on how I could make these in my 2nd grade class.  I decided writing was the way to go. Source: Free Kids Crafts Source: Cocoa Bean Here's a picture look at how our Rock Monsters turned out!  (We made the teeth with white out) Yes, our Rock Monsters are in plastic bags because I displayed them in the hallway like this: One of my kiddos wrote this about why the Rock Monster is in a bag: I made some Rock Monster paper that you can get for FREE if you click on the image below! Since I am on the Monster theme...In Math we played Math Movers: Monster Edition as a review for our end of the nine weeks assessments! Here are f...
I was planning for next week and realized that I keep making posters for each genre of literature that I am teaching each week.  I know there are some posters already out there but I also wanted some other resources like bookmarks and journal glossary cards.  So I decided to make a big ol' pack of resources to teach 26 of the children's literary genres.  I found the cutest clip art and have to say that the posters turned out super cute!  For each genre I made an instructional poster, a bookmark and a journal card for our writing journal glossaries. Here's a list of all the genres included: • Fiction • Drama • Fable • Fairy Tale • Fantasy • Folktale • Historical Fiction • H orror • Humor • Legend • Mystery • Mythology • Poetry • Realistic Fiction • Science Fiction • Short Story • Tall Tale • Non-Fiction • Biography • Autobiography • Essay • Narrative Non-Fiction • Speech • Recipe • How- To • Pourquoi Tale You can...
I have been tirelessly teaching informational text and non-fiction text features to my little 2nd graders and realized I needed to add a few new things to my posters.  The updated version now has a poster for sidebar, hyperlink, icon and cutaway.  They are still FREE from TPT and you can get them by clicking on the image below! ...
I would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who purchased during the bloggy birthday sale , it's still going on until tonight at midnight if you haven't had a chance to grab some sale prices!  The blog is now somewhat together but I have yet to add to all those great tabs at the top.  I will be working on that during the next week or so, so there are still some more changes coming.   Last night I realized that the end of the 1st nine weeks is coming up fast which means I am supposed to give the 1st nine weeks math assessment next week.  So, as a fun review I created a new Math Movers game!  This cute clip art from KPM Doodles and the fact that it's October inspired a monster theme! Here is a small preview of what kinds of questions and recording sheets are included. A 2nd grade common core alignment is also included in the packet!  ...
Please excuse the state of the blog, Primary Punch is getting a makeover to celebrate it's one year birthday and we have run into a few hic-ups along the way!  The blog will (hopefully) be corrected and up and running like normal in a few days!  Thanks for sticking with me! In the meantime I am throwing a flash sale over on Teachers Pay Teachers to celebrate Primary Punch's bloggy birthday!  The sale will only last for today, so make sure you head over there and check it out! (Fonts from Jen Jones at Hello Literacy ) ...
I have had a lot of questions about how I run literacy centers in my room lately.  We don't use Daily 5, our county has it's own framework it wants us to use but with the new Common Core we aren't limited to using a basal reading series anymore which is great!  This is a long one but full of good information and hopefully some new ideas. So, here is how literacy centers goes down in my room of 2nd graders! First let's start with the Tic-Tac-Toe.  This is my "contract", I make a new one each week and it has all my kiddos center information on it for the week. The directions are there but we go over and over the center routines as a whole group many times before I ever put them in a center independently.  So, for example during the first week of school we only did the top row of centers,  a different one each day as a whole group to learn the routine.  Then during week two I added a row, and so forth. Here's next week's Tic-Tac-Toe for biographies:  ...
Happy Wednesday everyone!  This has not been my week, yesterday was just a big ol' mess for a lot of reasons that I'd rather not go into and today I was observed by three people at the same time (I didn't know two were coming) for about an hour, had an IEP meeting and a school improvement team meeting after school...it has been quite a week!  So, I was sitting here making next week's ELA Unit (trying to keep my eyes open) and decided it was time for another freebie.  If you are interested in a few things to help teach Biographies click on the picture below to download a FREE mini-unit from google docs.   Clip art is courtesy of Scrappin' Doodles and some frames are from Fancy Dog Studio .   This unit is a smaller than some of the others I have made, I am pulling in some resources from different sources for next week including the e-book, Jane Goodall from  Reading A to Z , The Teacher Wife's Biography pack and we are working our way through making an...