How would you go about making a more balanced classroom?

Second grade teachers previously used a program called ' Letterland ' where each letter would be a character and they would dress up in the characters letter and in small classes, the teacher would ask the letters to become words that she calls out which helped students organize themselves into words in a fun way. The system is no longer in place but I felt it is something that could be brought back again.

There is currently a DARE policy at school-'Drop Everything And Read'implemented by the new Head of section whereby every other week, the whole school, right up to Grade 12 and the cleaning staff and administration stop and drop everything they are doing to just write for 20 minutes. The stories are then published in the weekly newsletter.

I would even follow this activity up with DEW-'Drop Everything and Write' to help young learners get the ability to decode text and write their views on it to see if there are gaps in comprehension. Retelling stories has its limitations.

Poems for second graders are hidden around the school as well and in their free time at recess, students are encouraged to find the poems and they have then bragging rights as to how many poems they found in a week but the whole idea is to get have them look and search for words. They then construct their own poems and hide them for their class. The first three people to find poems get to read them to the other class members.

Take a class outside the classroom but remaining in the school grounds, near a tree, by some benches and have a literature circle where they all bring in their favourite books once a week and read a chapter or a small section. The children get to discuss the books afterwards. It’s like a Book Club for kids.

Alternatively, the teacher could read a story about nature and see if this inspires others to do the same for the following week or have the children research a nature book to read to the rest of class.

Word trees were placed in classrooms to encourage the tree to grow bigger and by the end of the school year, the words on the tree would have grown all over the classroom. The same goes for an author's tree in which guest speakers come into the classroom and read a story to children, that they then have to write about after, retelling the story in their own words,

Last week, I brought a slideshow of a recent visit to Yemen to show students in Grade 2 pictures of a children’s school in Yemen and after the show, there was a Q&A and then they all settled down to write about what they had seen. They retold the most amazing stories.

I also read out books to them in other weeks where they get to make the sounds of animals from a text. Tommie de Paola and Eric Carle books are the current favourite hit and the illustrations are amazing.

It was interesting to watch last week as the teacher introduced the topic of suffixes and prefixes to a Grade 2 class. She asked the children to describe one student in the class, using the words, friendly, popular, interesting, honest and then asked the students what the opposites of those words would be. It was good to see the words immediately recognised even if they had not used them in any context beforehand.

I think the second new strategy that I would like to use would be word rings. I have never used them before but for each student, I would try and build up their vocabulary of words using a word ring adding to it every week, asking for explanations of the words on it as a review and asking them to provide a few new words for the week which would be added to the ring. I feel that the word ring is a much more detailed approach than the word wall.