Hoppy Easter and Happy Spring!

Just thought this was the cutest thing.

Still new to blogging, and would LOVE to hear from you!

Hello and Welcome to Growing Readers Day by Day!

I'm still new at blogging, so I hope you don't mind weeding through my posts for random topics. I just discovered blogging despite my 20 years as a teacher.  But if I confessed to you that it was a first grader years ago who taught me how to turn on a computer, than you'd believe that I really have come a long way!

Well, I haven't yet learned how to organize everything, so bear with me, please. I do have some random freebies which link back to my teachers store, but I'm trying to figure out how to make it so you can also get them from this blog!  My teachers store at Teachers Pay Teachers is also new, so I'm learning all kinds of new things--along the lines of social networking, and technical things that I guess I always took for granted.

Having been a reading specialist for several years, I have a ton of tools and ideas that I've either created or discovered along the way. So I hope you'll join me again soon--and hopefully, I'll have tackled all the technical hang ups and blogging bugs.

I appreciate all you teachers, parents, grandparents, and others out there who are involved with the teaching of literacy, children's books, and love to do artsy-crafty things for kids....and of course, any tips or resources that just helps us teachers do our jobs a little bit better.

Let me know if you stop by--I would love to hear from you. I hope to share good stuff with you and hopefully, you've got some great things you'd like to share as well. If you're a teacher, then you know what it's like to find yourself more of a learner than a teacher! That's where I'm at right now!

Enjoy each day to the fullest, and Happy Spring!
Karen

May the Luck O' the Irish Be With You!

Courtesy of mycutegraphics.com

Free Turtle Bookmarks and Writing Prompts

CLICK HERE TO GRAB THIS SET OF BOOKMARKS AND WRITING PROMPTS

If you are looking for more English/Language Arts resources, check out my store for other fun freebies and price products.

Growing Smart Readers

Second Graders--Busy With Nonfiction

My second grade reading group has been working on responding to nonfiction text in their writers' notebooks...and doing a very good job of it. Much of it is working on the features of a good paragraph. We've discovered a few easy tricks just to get the structure down. Overall, they've been doing some great work and I'm proud of them!

So far, we've covered The Aye-Aye, How Animals Move, Bats, Bees, and we'll be finishing up The Emperor Penguin next week. Our next study will be biographies, and writing about our 16th president (and my favorite) Abraham Lincoln. What class doesn't like to read and write about Abraham Lincoln?

Something tells me, we need to study a famous woman right after that. Hmm, there are so many to choose from...Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Sacajawea, Abigail Adams, Betsy Ross, Emily Dickenson, Amelia Earhart, Mary Casatt, Jessie Wilcox Smith, Helen Keller, Rosa Parks, Hilary Clinton, ...and Michelle Obama!  Where do I begin?!


Sacagewea






Our Cool Snow Dudes are Melting!

 

 

And one dudette!

Penguins from Egg Cartons

I found this cute penguin chick on Pinterest. We'll make something new from something old...a great example to teach and model recycling while making it a part of our reading and language arts program. This will be added to our Grade 2 reading unit study of Antarctica we will be doing over the next few weeks.