Dinosaurs and Character Traits

Two more days left! My last day is on Thursday, and I am ready for a break! I am very sorry to see this group of students leave; they are all so sweet. But I am excited to see them grow and mature next year in third grade.I have done a lot of fun activities in the past few weeks, but for now, I will just focus on dinosaurs and character traits. I will probably do another post next week with more of my specific end of the year activities.

I have loved learning about dinosaurs with my students. As a teacher, it might be easy to shy away from expository text, because it is can be more difficult to comprehend. But over the past month, I have heard more students say things like, "Wow, I never knew that", and "That's so amazing!" than I have with any other reading unit.

For this first project, I read books that I have collected about four dinosaurs: ankylosaurus, velociraptor, spinosaurus, and iguanodon.  Then the students wrote a page about each dinosaur, and we looked at a map to locate where the fossils were found. At the end, I stapled them together in a little booklet.

We also discussed the different theories for why dinosaurs became extinct. We read Why Did the Dinosaurs Disappear? by Melvin Berger. Then, my students created a pop-up book to explain the two most predominant theories for why the dinosaurs became extinct. My second graders loved this project, and they were so excited with the finished product!

Okay, now I am moving on from dinosaurs to character traits. A lot of schools, including ours, are placing a heavy emphasis on character education. Every month, I teach a lesson for the monthly character trait. After discussion, we fill out a page that includes the definition, which we look up in the dictionary together, and we write about how we can portray that character trait in our everyday lives. On Friday, we finished up with our last character page, and then we stapled all of the traits together into a booklet. Here is our finished product:

It's an oreo cookie! The outside of the booklets are brown, and then the character traits are all on white paper. After reviewing our character traits as a class, I told the students to show their parents. It will be such a great visual for their parents to see how we are learning about character in school, and hopefully they can find some use for it this summer.

If your year is over, enjoy your summer! If you are like me and have a few days left, I wish you the best of luck as you finish your school year strong!

The Virtual Mall

Okay, we are coming up on the end of the school year. I am assuming that a lot of you teachers reading this might already been finished with your school year. If so, happy summer! This summer is going to be a little different than most summers for me because I will be leading a summer school program for the first time. I am so excited to be able to help these kids get prepared for the demands of the next grade level, and it will give me some great material to post for you guys, since I will be required to create a lot of differentiation with all of the needs that will be present in my group.

So... on to the Virtual Mall. In our second grade social studies curriculum, the students learn a lot about needs vs. wants, and how to be a smart shopper. They learn that it is important to not just spend money, but also to save. If we were to just follow the curriculum, it could get a little boring. A few years ago, one of the teachers on our team came up with the idea of creating a "Virtual Mall". This is not "virtual" in the sense that it is on the computer. This is "virtual" because it is simulating a real shopping/selling experience.

Students were given a business proposal sheet. They were required to talk with their parents and come up with an idea for their "store". They had to get creative, because they were not supposed to spend over $3.00 to start up their store. Their parents needed to discuss the feasibility of their store with them, as well as the supplies they would need. I also took a look at their business proposal and made sure that it would work in the classroom setting. Once students were given the okay, we designed signs for their store. We talked about how their sign was the source of marketing for their store, so it needed to be clear in what they were selling, and it needed to draw people in.

Then came the day of the Virtual Mall. (I know the smiley faces are cheesy, but I want to protect my students' privacy :) )

Students were so creative with what they were selling. There were students selling lemonade, friendship bracelets, massages, tattoos, sweets, popcorn, snow cones, cotton candy, gumballs, nail painting, hair spiking, crab racing, wagon rides, etc. This really is my favorite day of the year because it is such a fun event, and the students learn so much! These girls below actually contacted local businesses to have them donate some supplies to their store so they could stay within the $3.00 limit. One girl even handed out the flyers of the companies who had donated candy to her store. She is learning at a young age the importance of networking with local businesses!

We split up the shopping and the selling between the classes. For one hour two of the four classes were shopping while the other two were selling, and then we switched for the second hour. We even invited the classes from other grade levels to come and shop at our stores. We had each student bring two dollars in change with them, so they could shop at the stores of their classmates. This meant that all students had to be competitive in their pricing, since everyone had no more than $2.00 to spend. I observed my students learning the power of differentiating their product from other products, so that they could be successful!

At the end of the activity, students got to keep the money that they had made. Some students made over $20.00 because they were also smart spenders, and others had literally spent everything that they had made. We talked about the difference between spending and saving, and they were actually able to make real life connections with what they had been learning in their social studies lessons. It was a powerful and incredibly fun activity. Students didn't even want to stop their stores to go to recess.

Hope you found some of these ideas useful! Days like this always take a little extra work, but let me assure you that this is completely worth it!!!