Drumroll please…..
THE 2ND GRADE MORNING WORK UPDATE IS FINISHED!!!!!!!!
Why do I do these things to myself?
“Update the morning work,” I said.
“It’s just a few tweaks. It’ll go fast,” I said.
I thought this project would take maybe 15-20 hours. Yeah…you’d think I’d know by now. 5,836 minutes later (that’s 97 hours for those of you playing along at home) I finished! Add that to the roughly 500 hours that went into this previously and, well, you have quite the labor of love!
I really think it was worth it, though! Lemme show you what I did.
When I first started this, I really liked the look of the numbered boxes with the numbers in the gray half-circles. I still really like the look but there were 2 problems with that:
1. Some people had problems getting the gray to print well.
2. It meant my boxes all had to be long and skinny. For some questions that was good, for some it wasn’t. It became a particular issue with the story problems. There just wasn’t room to work. I used the model of our 1st grade morning work and made larger boxes at the bottom of the page.
Also, I reduced the number of multiple-choice questions (some pages have 2 questions, some pages have 1) in favor of including more place value practice. And I knuckled down and made a bazilion clock images so there is more telling time practice, too.
Gone are the “Guess my Rule” questions. I loved them, but popular they were not. In their place are phonics search and write activities (read the sentences, look for words with target sounds/spelling, sort them on the chart).
With the first grade morning work, I really liked having the sight word practice right on the page instead of transferring it from the board. Using that idea, I chose 10 high-frequency words to practice in each cycle. There are 8 different activities (4 for even cycles, 4 for odd) that repeat through the book. The list of sight words is included in the file.
(Please forgive the hard to read screen caps. You can see everything more clearly in the sample download.)
The spelling boxes have stayed the same except for the sailboat spelling. My kids never really caught onto it and if the words were more than 4 letters it got really tedious.
When it comes to “Write your spelling words in the little boxes” the activity is the same, but the shape changes with each cycle (apples, kites, tissue boxes, etc.). Keeps things a little more engaging, I hope!
The text for the stories hasn’t changed much, but the question part has. I wanted to make it more rigorous so the multiple choice questions are scaled back or taken out altogether (depending on the story) and the graphic organizers require more evidence from the text. I also added “I can” statements.
(Can I just say that I’m really please with how this “main idea” graphic organizer turned out!)
Most of the other features of the pages stayed the same, but I did add money questions starting with the first cycle on the most basic level.
And I added some “shades of meaning” vocabulary rankings. (That is not my favorite objective!)
Want a peek at the finished deal? Download a ten-page sample. (It includes the first 5 pages and 5 pages from the end of the year so you can see the level of difficulty. Some of the spacing got mangled as I cut-and-pasted the file, but I didn’t have the patience to fix it. The actual product doesn’t have those issues.)
A lot of people have asked about an answer key. Now you’re in luck! There is one included in the file!
If you already purchased the file, go to the “My purchases” section at Teachers Pay Teachers and download a new version.
If you haven’t bought it yet, you can get it here.
