Second Grade, Writing, Set One

From The Magic Pencil:

• K. did the All About Me activity. I laid her down on a sheet of butcher paper and traced around her. On scrap paper I demonstrated what she was supposed to do (see below for some examples). She didn't really get the idea at first and colored herself in the first day. The next day she did better and wrote stuff around her shape. Then she was "done". The third day I asked her to find three more things to write, so she wrote about her heart, lungs, and feet. K. really likes her finished product and wants to hang it up. I'm thinking about doing this again when she is in 7th and 12th grades to see how she changes/improves.
• Where her eyes are, write something like: My eyes are brown. I like to look at flowers and sunsets.
• For the nose: I like to smell . . .
• On the legs: I like to run, ride my bike, climb . . .
• Next was the All About My Home activity, where K. drew a map of our house and wrote in each room what was there and what we did in that room.

From Games for Writing:

• We played Egg Carton Tales (pg 134). K. has gotten into the habit of making her story be 3 or 4 sentences, so I told her the stories had to be at least 2 minutes long and used the timer.
• This is the first time we played What a Personality (pg 124). Make ahead a game card for each player. There are fifteen sections. Each section has a different phrase, such as: My character's hair color is, or My character laughs when, or Someday my character would like to. Peggy Kaye gives all the phrases/categories in the book. To play you pick a character. It can be one you make up or from a book or story and take turns filling in the categories. My character was Jo from Little Women. Here are a couple of my sentences: My character gets angry when Meg likes Mr. Brooke. On Saturday my character likes to hide away in the attic and write.
• We had played Three Sentence Challenge (pg 146) last year, and we enjoyed playing it again. Write out a few lists of four items that go together (car, truck, bus, motorcycle). The player writes three sentences that should allow the other player to guess which of the four items they are thinking of. You cannot use any of the words in the list when writing your sentences.
• Forbidden Letters (pg 130) was a new game, and we really enjoyed it. We started writing a story about a monkey at the zoo. On the first page we couldn't use any words that had the letter 'g'. Do you realize that big, large, huge, and gigantic all have g's?! Then on the next page we were going to have a different forbidden letter, but we couldn't keep the story going, so we decided to start another story.