Fall Is Here!  We Love It!
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Donna Kielty's 2nd Grade
  Clarke School
 Swampscott, Massachusetts
Class Website

 

Our class fall favorites were :
Fall is Here- I Love It! by Elaine W. Good
The Season of Arnold 's Apple Tree by Gail Gibbons
Big Pumpkin by Erika Silverman  (the listening center tape is great!)

After reading Fall is Here-I Love It!  our class was inspired to write our own 5 senses poetry about the fall.
We began by creating a web of the 5 senses and brainstormed fall things related to each sense.  Apple Orchards are a popular fall destination around our area.  We love the apple cider donuts, pumpkin patches, farm animals, and of course apple picking!
After our discussion we started our "first draft" of our class poem.

Our first draft looked like this:

In the fall...l
I see scarecrows.
I hear tractors.
I smell apple cider donuts.
I touch farm animals.
I tasted Halloween candy.
Fall is Here- I Love it!

The next day during writing we learned how adjectives add a little spice to our writing and give the reader a better picture in their head, so we added 2 adjectives  to each of the fall things.  Another day we learned about predicate expanders and added those to our class poem.

Here is our final "new and improved" poem:

In the fall...
We
see stuffed, straw scarecrows scaring crows away in the cornfield.
We
hear noisy, dirty tractors plowing down the cornstalks on the farm.
We
smell fresh apple cider donuts cooking at the apple orchard.
We
touch cute, soft farm animals walking at the farm petting zoo.
We
taste chocolate Halloween candy from my trick or treat bag.
Fall is Here-We  Love It!

Everyone in our class wrote their own 5 senses poems and we bound them into a book.  You can read them on our class website.

We were inspired by other fall stories to create some wonderful glyphs that decorated our bulletin boards.  The Seasons of Arnold's Apple Tree had us thinking about apples and apple picking. We made apple glyphs and answered questions relating to apples. The stem color told us who likes to eat apples and who doesn't. The worm in the apple told us who has and who has not been apple picking.  Our class website will give you the key to the glyph.

We also made pumpkin glyphs after reading Big Pumpkin!

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Below are the Massachusetts standards addressed with these activities.
Language Arts Standards

Students will pose questions, listen to the ideas of others, and contribute their own information or ideas in group discussions or interview in order to acquire new knowledge.
Students will understand and acquire new vocabulary and use it correctly in reading and writing.
Students will identify and analyze how an author’s words appeal to the senses, create imagery, suggest mood, and set tone and provide evidence from the text to support their understanding.
Students will write with a clear focus, coherent organization and sufficient detail.
Students will use knowledge of standard English conventions in their writing, revising and editing.
Students will organize ideas in writing in a way that makes sense for their purpose.

Math Standards (glyphs)

Students engage in problem solving, communicating, reasoning, connecting and representing as they:
*Use interviews, surveys and observations to gather data about themselves and their surroundings.
*Organize, classify, represent and interpret data using tallies, charts, tables, bar graphs, pictographs and Venn diagrams & interpret the representations.
*Formulate inferences (draw conclusions) and make educated guesses about a situation based on information gained from data.