Last year as part of my morning routine students wrote about Wonderopolis’ Wonder of the Day in Wonder Journals. Because of budget cuts in my district, I am not sure if we will get any student journals, so I began thinking of an alternative to using journals in my second grade classroom.
My teaching partner and I talked and decided to create a form to put in a Wonder of the Day folder. She created the first one below that we will be using at the beginning of the year and I created the second one that we will use later in the year.
We discussed what parts of the Wonder we thought were important and tried to incorporate those into the forms. Some features we want students to think about are: their thinking about the Wonder before reading it, based on the question posed and picture, new learning after reading over the Wonder as a class and the Wonder Words.
At the beginning of the year, we will be posting a word from the Wonder that we want students to learn as we read over the Wonder. At the beginning of the year (the first form), students will be writing what they think the word means based on what they Wonder is. Later in the year, we would like students to write their own definition of the Wonder Word and use it in their own sentence after going over the Wonder. Wonderopolis’ is an excellent resource for helping to build vocabulary.
I’m excited to use these forms in a Wonder Folder this year and see how it impacts student learning. Feel free to email me if you would like me to send you either form.