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!