Second Grade, Grammar, Set One

• I introduced the concept of Common and Proper Nouns.
• First, I wrote "Noun" at the top of a paper. I asked K. if she remembered what a noun was.
• Then I wrote "Person - Place - Thing" underneath "Noun".
• Under that I wrote "Common Noun" and "Proper Noun".
• On the left side of the paper I wrote the sentence: We went to the city.
• On the right side I wrote: We went to Cerritos.
• Then we talked about city being a common noun and Cerritos being a proper noun (a specific person, place, or thing).
• Next, I wrote: "sister" and "Debbie" in the center of the paper. I asked her which was common and which was proper and drew arrows from each word to the left (common) or right (proper) side of the paper.
• We did the same thing with: "fireman" and "Fireman Jones".
• Now it was time to Play a Game:
• I had 14 cards with common nouns written on them. We mixed up the cards and laid them on the table.
• We took turns turning over a card and giving a proper noun for each common noun.
• Example: If I turned over "park", I would give the name of a specific park, such as "Rynerson Park".
• Here are all the card words: park, street, place, holiday, book, language, day, month, city, school, person, church, state, country
• We talked about Singular and Plural Nouns. Theses terms were new to her, but we have talked about "-s means more than one" many times.
• First I wrote "Nouns" at the top of the page.
• Under that I wrote "Singular & Plural".
• I asked K. if she knew what those words meant.
• On the left side of the paper I drew one cat. On the right side I drew two cats.
• I wrote "cat" by the one and "cats" by the two, and explained that singular means one and plural means more than one.
• Now it was time to Play a Game:
• We took turns writing either singular or plural words.
• The other person would illustrate the word.
• Example: She wrote "butterfly" and I drew one butterfly. I wrote "stars" and K. drew five stars.
• I introduced Pronouns.
• I used Child's Own, starting at page 41. It talks a bit about pronouns, then it has a story where they use no pronouns, but they want the child to give other words for the repeated words.
• Example: Billy said, "Billy wants a lollipop." You replace the second "Billy" with "I".
• We made a list of the words we replaced -- the pronouns.
• We learned about Homophones -- words that sound the same, but are spelled differently and have different meanings.
• Game:
• We made a matching game by putting a word on one card and a picture on its match.
• Example: A card with the word "blue" and another with a blue octopus. A third card with the word "blew" and a fourth with a girl blowing bubbles.
• Some words (to, for, our) aren't easily pictured, so we put the meaning on some (meaning belonging to us) or the part of speech (a preposition).
• Friendly Letters
• I showed K. the form friendly letters should follow (you can Google this if you need to be reminded -- I did).
• Then she wrote a letter to thank a friend for a present.
• She will be writing a letter each week until she has written all the "thank you's" from her birthday.
• Sentence vs. Fragment -- a complete sentence is a complete thought; it has two parts who/what and the action.
• I started by writing "The big green frog" and asked K. if that was a complete thought. She told me no. I asked her to complete the sentence. She wrote "jumped on the tiger".
• Next she wrote "The tiny fish" and we decided that wasn't a complete sentence. I added "swam around the bowl".
• We took turns going back and forth this way.
• Another day I took a bunch of word cards and we made sentences, showing that complete sentences had the two parts.
• The last day we went back to the sentences we wrote down and K. drew a line between the subject and the action.
• Capitalization
• The first day we completed a worksheet.
• Game:
• I took the game board we made and a spinner with numbers 1 - 4. Player 1 dictated a sentence to Player 2. If player 2 capitalized correctly then she got to spin and go that many spaces. Then the roles were switched.
• The second day we played this I printed out a couple worksheets because thinking up sentences made the game drag a bit. Maybe it depends on the age of the players.
• Writing Instructions
• I gave K. a choice of writing how to make the bed or how to set the table. She chose setting the table. However, her instructions were very short. Example: Put plates. Put knives. Put forks. Put spoons.
• She wasn't being receptive to my instructions, and it was lunch time. After we ate, I had her read what she wrote and I acted it out. "Put plates." Well, it doesn't say where, or what size of plate, or how many, so I just put a stack of dessert plates on a chair. Then she worked through rewriting her instructions bit by bit to get something that was usable. "Put one dinner plate on the table at each place a person will sit." We went through each step of setting the table like that. We were able to laugh and have fun while she corrected her work.
• The following day we used the thesaurus to replace all the "put"s with place, set, stick, etc.