Second Grade, Writing, Set Three

From Writing Hangups:

• Can of Words page 13 -- I let K. spend a few days writing a story about whatever she wanted. Then we cut a paper that would cover a can and she wrote an advertisement about the story on the paper. We glued the paper to the can and she rolled up the story and placed it in the can.
• Clothes Lines -- I had an unused white t-shirt, that was sleepwear, so we wrote bedtime slogans on it with some fabric paint that I had.
• Colossal Card -- K. made a very large Mother's Day card
• Costume Conversations -- we haven't finished it yet. K. wants a bird costume and we are still working on it. (Week 5) We finished the costume and K. wrote about the bird on it.

From Games for Writing:

• Forbidden Letters page 130 -- our forbidden letter was j this time. It didn't make any difficulties, so before we play this game again, I will change the choice of letters to the next harder set.
• My Character -- I was Humpty Dumpty and K. was Mary Poppins
• Writing to Form page 139 -- I just photocopied a story in the book
• Acrostic Poem page 69 -- on the inside of the mother's day card
• Mixed Up and Missing page 107 -- I cut the sentences apart and K. put them together. Then we used all the words from all the sentences to make more sentences.

From Cursive Writing Made Easy and Fun by Kama Einhorn:

• Cat's Cradle -- I took a length of yarn and tied it in a circle and used it to teach K. how to play Cat's Cradle. The point of this is that if you follow the proper steps you can form many shapes with the yarn, but it is just one continuous piece of yarn. Likewise, cursive writing uses one continuous line to form words, and careful steps taken in the right order form letters.
• Continuous Line Doodles -- there are examples of different doodles in the book. We used markers and lined paper to doodle on. Sometimes I made the doodle with pencil and she traced over it with the marker. We will be working on this activity many more times as K. doesn't yet have the control she needs.

I wanted to start doing something with cursive because K. has started joining her letters together in an attempt to write in cursive. I found this book at the library (then bought a pdf version at Scholastic's Teacher Express website). I really like it because it has activities for all learning styles.