Product Swap

This is our first time participating in Jessica's Product Swap.  We both lucked out and got take a look at some amazing products.  Juli's review is below mine.  I was linked up with Heidi Harrell from In That Room...Adventures In Second Grade.

 

If you are not a follower of her blog, you really should go follow her.  I love her blog. She shares great ideas and even blogs about her class pet guinea pig. As an animal lover, I look forward to updates on Patches. She suggested I take a look at her Freckle Juice Novel Study:

 and I am so glad she did! My class LOVED it! The book itself is perfect for second graders. Her unit includes pre reading activities, chapter quizzes, inference activities, a craftivity, a fact and opinion flip book, a graphing activity, and MORE! First I started off with the pre reading and prediction activities.  I loved some of the answers for the predictions!

She wrote that she predicts that Freckle Juice is probably a name of a juice of someone pops a freckle and juice comes out of it. GROSS!

One of the more dramatic predictions was that Freckle Juice will kill someone! Yikes!

The craftivity was really cute and the class enjoyed making their very own Freckle Juice folder to hold their work.  I thought they turned out really cute...

I was being cheap and printed the covers off in black and white. The product actually comes with red dots which would have looked really cute. Color printer ink is actually more valuable than gold in our school.  

The class really enjoyed the inference activity and it was a great way to encourage finding text evidence (you're welcome 3rd grade teachers).  I had them work in pairs to find the character actions that led to our inferences about the characters: 

If you are regular follower of our blog, then you know my class tends to be a tad dramatic.  This meant I wasn't surprised by some of my girls Text To Self responses:

At least they are honest right?!

There are SO many other activities that we did and that are included in this pack. I strongly encourage you to do this novel study (with this unit of course!) if you teach second grade. I think it would work well with third graders as well.  My class really enjoyed the book and the activities from Heidi's unit.  If you wish to visit her blog, you can find it HERE. If you want direct access to this awesome unit, you can find it at TPT HERE.  

She also has a really cute contraction activity:

You can find this fun activity at TPT HERE.

I was so excited about Jessica's Product Swap the last time she did it that I decided that if she hosted it again, I would sign up!  I was excited when I got the email letting me know that I had been linked up with Anita from i live 2 learn i love 2 grow.  If you don't already, head on over to her blog and begin following her.  She loves to use technology in her classroom and I have enjoyed all of her posts.  .

She gave me her All About the Sonoran Desert pack to try in my classroom.   

When she first told me about the pack I got really excited because my students are working on reading informational text.  Specifically, we are working with determining importance when reading text.  The first things I got really excited about were the QR codes.  If you have a device that can read a QR code, it will pull up articles, websites, and videos for the students to read.  

I decided that I was going to use this pack to accompany the work that my students have been doing in Guided Reading.  I only have one device to read a QR code so I decided to split my guided reading groups into three stations.  A computer station, a book station, and the desert fact card station.  Instead of using the QR codes, I pulled all of the websites and videos up on my computer for my kids to browse through.  While they looked through all of the information online they adding details to their books that they created about the Sonoran Desert.  

Then I had a basket of books all about deserts.  The students needed to browse through the books looking for specific details about the Sonoran Desert.  

Finally at the third station the students worked with the desert fact cards. 

The thing I enjoyed most about using this pack in my guided reading groups, was that I could tailor the books they were creating to different things so that all of them weren't creating the exact same book.  I also loved that the kids were wonderfully engaged in the research of the desert.  While they were so engaged, I could rotate through the group and work individually with my students on the skills and strategies they need work with.  The kids really had a great time completing this activity and it worked really well with the guided reading skills that I have been teaching.

I highly recommend heading over to Anita's shop and picking this packet up.  It is priced so well too!  Only $3.00 for all of these amazing activities for your students in your classroom.

I am so happy that I signed up for Jessica's product swap and I am excited to hear about all of the other products that were swapped!

Happy Swapping!