Once Upon a Time...

Once upon a time, a second grade teacher was beginning her blog... Last week, my friends, was a crazy week.  Fortunately, I got through it though, because this week is SPRING BREAK!  Can I have a woot-woot?!  I have been so jealous of all of you who already HAD your spring break.  And some of you for more than a week, no less!  But now it is my turn and that gives me time to relax, rejuvenate and turn my attention to blogging and creating!

Last Friday we had our school-wide Read In day.  We spent the whole day doing reading activities based on a theme.  This year the theme was "fairy tales."  It came at just the right time to connect to the folktales unit we have been doing.  We identified characteristics of both genres and compared and contrasted the two.  We read TONS of fairy tale and folktake stories, made cute foldables for story elements, did a web for character traits...

I know, I know... it would have been nice to have some pictures to go with all these ideas.  But being as I am new to blogging, I haven't yet remembered to take pictures all day, so this time you'll have to settle for a freebie.  (Way to redeem myself, I know.)

Our grade level divided the kiddos into 4 groups and they rotated through different activities for the morning.  I did a "Read the Room ~ Fairy Tale Style" activity.  My students LOVE to read the room.  They love to walk around the room.  They love to dance around the room... or jump... or crawl.. or boogie..  I have a very energetic class.  Movement is important here.

Anyway... I gave them each a "Find It" sheet with little snippets about different fairy tale characters.  I had posted cards with fairy tale character names and information all around the room.  Their job was to "read the room" and try to find the name of the fairy tale character who fit the description in one of the boxes.  Here's what I mean:

There were 12 different cards to match their sheet.  They had a blast.  I told them even if they KNEW which fairy tale it was from reading the sheet, they still had to find that card and read the information just to be sure.  After everyone was done, we shared our answers.  You can download the whole thing from Google docs by clicking on the picture above.  (Hopefully you can ... being new to blogging I'm just learning how all this works.)

 

I have to say, I was a little disappointed about how little some of them knew about fairy tales!  Even ones I thought would be easy, some of our kiddos hadn't heard of.  And don't even get me started on the fact that Rapunzel is NOT the same as "Tangled!"  Apparently fairy tales and nursery rhymes are becoming lost.  So sad.

 

 

Well, I think that's enough for one blog post.  I'm going to go find my Kindle and some trashy magazines and enjoy some "me" time! 

 

The End.