Sentence Surgery!

Hello friends! Hope everyone has had a spectacular start to the new school year :) 

Wow, it's been a long time since my last post! I have missed getting all my creative energy out through this blog. 

I spent this past summer working two different jobs, and I was basically operating at full speed all the time! I barely had time for a social life, let alone to catch up on my blogging! I have been itching to write a new post for months, but just haven't had the time! So, without further adieu, here is my first post for the new school year...

I am starting off this fall with a BANG, as I am now in my LAST semester of college ever!!! I am student teaching here in my hometown in a second grade classroom. I am working with an amazing cooperating/mentor teacher. She has been teaching for twenty-five years and she is a PRO at what she does. I feel so blessed to get to work with her! 

Student teaching is like having a full time job...you're at school every weekday working and collaborating with your colleagues and getting to know your student babies. Even though it's exhausting, I love student teaching! I feel like a REAL teacher because I get to help plan lessons, attend events at the school, and assist in classroom management. It is an amazing experience!

Today, I taught my first formal lesson to my second graders. We have been going over sentence mechanics this week, i.e. putting words in a logical order to be a sentence and using capitalization and period marks in a sentence. Therefore, my lesson today was aimed to be guided practice and application on using capital letters and periods. When planning the lesson, I was trying to figure out how I could make this FUN for the kiddos. Then, it hit me. In our lesson, we would be trying to fix up some incomplete sentences...these sentences needed to be repaired! We needed to do some "sentence surgery" on these poor sentences so they could be perfect.

• First, we practiced correcting some sentences that did not contain beginning capital letters or periods as a class. I drew clothespins out of a cup (each clothespin has the number of a student) to call on students to help me correct the sentence.
• Next, I read a "paragraph" to the class that contained no beginning capital letters or periods (e.g. "today I went to the swimming pool with my family I used to be too scared to swim in the deep end so I would only stay in the shallow end then I took swimming lessons and learned to swim in the deep end"). I made a huge deal out of reading the sentence fast with no breath pauses to emphasize the importance of periods as breathing cues. The kids picked up on this right away and helped me correct the paragraph. We broke things up into proper sentences and kept an eye on capital letters and periods :)
• Finally, it was time for the fun part! I split the students into partners and explained that they were going to be performing "sentence surgery" on these "sick" sentences! We discussed how we go to a doctor when we are sick, so we were going to doctor up these sentences to make them better. 
• I told students that each pair would receive a sentence strip containing a "sick" sentence. Their job was to place Band-Aids on the areas that needed repairs and use a marker to write the correction. They were so excited to do this---what child doesn't love Band-Aids?

Here is an example of a sentence strip that each "sentence surgeon" pair received. Here's a note: I wrote random sentences that I knew my boys and girls would be able to read independently. However, you can make these sentence strips include weekly spelling/vocabulary words, or include your unit! That's the beauty of it---you can kill two birds with one stone!

And HERE'S what my little surgeons did to fix up the sentences! :) They used one Band-Aid to change capitalization and another to add a period.

I love how the last group did several operations before getting it just right! :) Also, I have found that throwing in relatable components to lessons keeps the children engaged. I have no clue how to play the game Mine Craft, but all my kiddos are obsessed with it. They were very excited to see Mine Craft being mentioned in their assignment!

 

The sweeties loved being hands-on with the Band-Aids! I was so proud of how well they worked with their partners and cured their "sick" sentences! I feel like they really have this concept down now, although I know it will take a lot more practice for it to become second nature. All in a day's work, right?! 

• Last but not least, I, the "head surgeon" :), checked their sentences out to make sure they were corrected appropriately. Then, I had the students write their sentences on a piece of paper and turn it in to me so I could have some form of assessment to refer back to. 

Thanks for sticking around through this long post :) I can't wait to keep updating y'all on my student teaching experience this semester! 

Hilary