Common Core? We're Working on It!

If you aren't in the education field, you might not know that we have new national standards to help improve our kids' learning.  They are called the "Common Core State Standards."  Teachers are learning how to incorporate them into lesson plans. So our teachers and kids are learning together!

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Mrs. Murphy's second grade class read some information about the Pilgrims.  Then they applied the new second grade KEY IDEAS AND DETAILS standard to what they read.  The kids were asked to identify the main topic of a multi-paragraph text as well as the focus of specific paragraphs within the text.

Mrs. Murphy made it more fun by having the kids write (and illustrate!) their own books. Their titles labelled their interpretations of the key idea: The Pilgrims Difficult Lives, for example, The Pilgrims Story, The Pilgrims Journey.  Then each following page identified the main idea of each paragraph.  The kids learned to pick out the important information and will eventually be able to take home book of their own.

Here are a few pages from two students' work: