Grade 2
-
Language
-
Reading: Foundational Skills
-
Reading: Informational
-
Reading: Literature
-
Speaking & Listening
-
Writing
-
Writing Foundational Skills
Arizona ELA Standard: 2.WF.2
Demonstrate and apply sound-letter concepts.
Valentine’s Day Codes
Teach your students about basic cryptography and code making.
Words Within Words: February
How many words can you find within February?
Words Within Words: Chocolate
How many words can you find within Chocolate?
Word Ladder: Fly to Bee (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Wild to Tame (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Words Within Words: PATRICK
How many words can you find within Patrick?
Words Within Words: RAINBOW
How many words can you find within rainbow?
Words Within Words: IRELAND
How many words can you find within Ireland?
Words Within Words: LATKES
How many words can you find within LATKES?
Words Within Words: CORNMAZE
How many words can you find within CORNMAZE?
Words Within Words: COBWEB
How many words can you find within COBWEB?
Aquamorphotron (Greek and Latin)
What on earth is a Aquamorphotron? Break apart the Greek and Latin roots, figure out what it should mean, then invent what it describes.
Words Within Words: ORNAMENT
How many words can you find within ORNAMENT?
Words Within Words: SCARECROW
How many words can you find within “scarecrow”?
Words Within Words: CRANBERRY
How many words can you find within “cranberry”?
Words Within Words: STUFFING
How many words are hiding inside STUFFING? More than you think.
Path Cipher (Codes Part 4)
Now let’s try the Path Cipher – a cipher that mixes things up even more than Zig Zag did.
Zig Zag Cipher (Codes Part 3)
Let’s try a cipher that doesn’t substitute new letters or shapes. We just mix things up.
Pig Pen Cipher (Codes Part 2)
Let’s encode some secret messages with a cipher that was actually used during the American Civil War!
Shift Cipher (Codes Part 1)
Let’s encode and decode secret messages like Julius Caesar!
Words Within Words: GENERAL
How many words can you find within “general”?
Words Within Words: Intro (SOLDIER)
How many words can you find within SOLDIER? 20? 35? 50? Even more!?
Words Within Words: TEACHER
How many words can you find within TEACHER?
Word Pyramids
Start with a one letter word, add another letter, then add another. How tall can you make the pyramid?
Word Pyramid: D to ASIDE
One letter. Add another. And another. How tall can you build the pyramid before you run out of words?
Word Pyramid: M to CAMPUS
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Word Pyramid: U to Brush
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Words Within Words: TROMBONE
How many words can you find within TROMBONE?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Mary Had A Little Lamb”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Lipogram: Rewrite “Twinkle, Twinkle”
What if we rewrote a piece of writing without using certain letters?
Words Within Words: AIRPLANE
How many words can you find within airplane?
Words Within Words: LEOPARD
How many words can you find within “leopard”?
Words Within Words: SATURN
How many words can you find within Saturn?
Word Pyramid: P to PLAINS
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Word Pyramid: T to PLANET
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect T and PLANET?
Word Pyramid: O to Stones
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Word Pyramid: I to LIONS
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Word Pyramid: T to Patch
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Word Pyramid: H to CRASH
Add a letter at each step to form a new word. Can you connect the starting point and ending point?
Cram
Try this a simple (but surprisingly strategic) grid-filling game!
Word Ladder: East to West (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Work to Hard (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Two to Six (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder – Cold to Cool (5-Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Fast to Race (4 step)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Arm to Leg (6-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Kid to Old (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Sky to Red (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder – Sun to Hot (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder – Tea to Hot (5-steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Band to Sing (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Foot to Shoe (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Word Ladder: Fire to Warm (4 Steps)
COLD to COOL. BAND to SING. Change one letter at a time — can you find the path?
Jotto
Who can guess the codeword first?
Word Ladders Introduction
You won’t believe how this spelling and vocabulary puzzle will get kids’ brains sweating over the smallest of words.
Words Within Words: MENORAH
How many words can you find within MENORAH?
Plurals: An Inductive Spelling Lesson
Plural nouns in English are deliciously fascinating. Yet most plural lessons are so dull! In this experience, students are given a pile of plurals and then inductively create groups and pull out rules and patterns.
Advanced Alliteration and Consonance
When students learn about alliteration, it’s hard to steer them away from goofy tongue-twisters. Certainly, there must be more powerful and practical ways of using alliteration. In this lesson, I draw on delicious examples from Shakespeare to show how a very advanced writer used alliteration. Then, I break those ideas down so students can try them out.
Bulls and Cows
How quickly can you break the numeric code?
Ghost
Ghost is a word-building game for two players. The first person to create an actual word loses.
Words Within Words: NUTCRACKER
How many words can you find within NUTCRACKER?
“Its Big Day” – A Children’s Story About Its and It’s
Let’s spice up a typically dull lesson about the difference between “its” and “it’s” by asking students to write a children’s story about the adventures of a critter named It.