Language Arts
Overview
The overall expectations found in Ontario’s Language Arts for Grades 2 and 3 are identical. Students are expected to further develop their reading, writing and communication skills while learning how to reflect on their strengths and weaknesses and look for opportunities to improve. In Room 220, students will work individually, in small, goal-oriented, teacher-supported groups and as a whole class to improve their penmanship, spelling, grammar, composition, reading, and understanding of both literary and multimedia texts.
Students will participate in daily reading and writing activities and will have one spelling quiz per week consisting of words with varying levels of difficulty. Students are encouraged to read and write at home as often as possible and to consider and reflect on the writing they produce and come in contact with.
My aim is to target each student’s strengths and weaknesses and utilize the former to minimize the latter. In this way, each student can progress in line with, but is not necessarily limited to, their grade curriculum.
Click here for the Ontario Language Arts Curriculum document
Spelling Words
A Note about our Levels
As you know, we have three levels of words each week. I am using this leveled approach to give students markers for success and a regular sense of accomplishment in there development as writers.
Level 1 words are predominantly Grade 1 spelling words. Students should, having practiced at home, be able to spell these words with little difficulty.
Level 2 words are Grade 2 and Grade 3 words. These are the words that we are really targeting and should have everyone spelling correctly by the end of the year.
Level 3 words range from Grade 4 to Grade 5 and are meant to provide all the students with a real challenge. Over half our class is already tackling these difficult words and with continued practice, I am sure we can increase that number.
Coraline
by Neil Gaiman
This award-winning Novella from Neil Gaiman's is creepy and wonderful with great characters and a perfectly advanced vocabularly to keeps us equally challenged and entertained. When Coraline and her parents move into an old house, the imaginative, adventurous and precocious young girl discovers a door that, during the day time, opens onto a solid brick wall, but at night leads somewhere very different. When she goes through, Coraline finds a home just like her own, only better, where her Other Mother and Other Father (who look like the real ones, except for the big black buttons they have for eyes) want her to stay forever. When Coraline decides against this, her other mother kidnaps her real parents, and Coraline must brave unknown dangers to save them.
In order to improve our writing skills and become more comfortable with the writing process, we have begun working on compact, biograpical entries in our writing journals. In these early stages we are focusing on mastering our ability to generate, gather and organize ideas. In the future, we'll use this activity to master drafting, revision, editing, proofreading and finally publishing. Our Journal Anchor Charts, found on our Room 220 walls, can be found below.
