What's Your Point of View?

   Ugh - I am finally done!  I've been flying under the radar recently so I could find time to finish my artifacts for my teacher evaluation.  Does anyone else have to do those?  We don't have to turn in any printed artifacts like I've seen some of you doing with evidence binders.  Our artifacts are all uploaded to an online program.  And even though I know many teachers in my building are happy with just photos and pdf documents, I had to go one step further (thanks to a colleague for the idea!).  Here's an example of a couple of my artifacts:

 

 

 Honestly, once I created the template the border, text and photos, it was pretty easy to go in and change the pictures an the description.  Doing it this way made more sense to me than just uploading a bunch of photos or documents.  (And call me crazy... but I may have even enjoyed creating the slides... just a little... :-)

Anyway, now that the artifact part of my eval is done, I can turn my attention to other things.  I wanted to share a really fun an successful activity I did with my kiddos a while back to show point of view.  Yep, we're all about Common Core in my room and this lesson just kind of happened.... have you ever had one of those happy occurrences?  As we were reading the story, Mr. Putter and Tabby Fly the Plane (and we were reading it to find friendship traits and for character development in the first place), one of my sweeties said, "Boy, Mr. Putter and Tabby really see things differently!"  Head slap!  Of course!  This turned out to be a perfect opportunity to work on point of view.

First, I created a sheet with copies of illustrations from the story at key points (which I cannot share because I really did just COPY the illustrations I needed).  I put the illustrations down one side of the page and drew thought bubbles from each one.  As we read the story and got to each part, we stopped and asked ourselves, "Hmmm... what would ______ (Mr. Putter or Tabby) be thinking right now?"  Then everyone wrote down thoughts in the bubbles.  I encouraged the kiddos to think and talk like the characters would.  Their responses were hilarious - and right on target!!  (I really WISH I had taken a picture of some of their papers.  No luck, they all went home.)  Everyone really understood the fact that poor Tabby was so anxious and Mr. Putter was "reliving his childhood" (quote from one of my darlings).

After we shared our ideas, I took ideas from different students to create this display in our hallway.

 ADORABLE!  My students still go by and read the thought bubbles sounding like the characters.  And they really go the POINT about perspective (haha.... funy, funny...)!

Since I can't share my original document with you, I created this one that you can download if you want.  Just click on the picture.

 

These next few weeks we are working on folktales and fables - and some dictionary skills.  (Random, I know... in my world it really does make sense.)  If anyone has some great dictionary skills ideas for second graders please share them!  I have a feeling this is going to be a tough one for my kiddos.