Have you ever given thought to how your children can learn and play with language? Perhaps you want to add a bit of fun to your language arts curriculum. Try playing games! Language Arts with Games This post may contain affiliate links. Please read my disclosure statement for more information. Sometimes playing with language can mean incorporating chalk markers on […]
A few weeks ago, I asked teachers on my FB page for topics of interest. I wrote all of the topics down and pinned them on my office's bulletin board. My bulletin board is my "go to" place when I need a topic for a blog post. Today's topic, vocabulary games, is courtesy of my FB readers. Here are a few games I found that you might like to try: This site has elementary and middle school games. Middle School Vocabulary Activities Elementary and middle school vocabulary game. My all around favorite site that had MANY activities including this one: Click to visit the site. It is great! This vocabulary packet is aligned with 1st - 3rd Common Core Standards. Click
Teaching grammar and language art skills can be a challenge for anyone. How do you hit all of the skills...effectively? How do you know your students are
Metaphors Language Arts Classroom Poster. Created by The Writing Doctor. Visit "The Write Prescription" dot com.
We studied the epic story of Perseus and discovered what makes an epic and an epic hero. We are going to begin reading Beowulf. This story comes from an Anglo-Saxon poem, which was probably written sometime between the years 700 and 800 A.D The Anglo-Saxon people began to settle in Britain around 450 A.D. They came from Europe, mainly from the countries we now call Germany and Denmark. Beowulf is written in an Anglo-Saxon Language (sometimes called Old English), but the the story does not take place in England at all. It is about some of the ancestors of the Anglo-Saxons, tribes who lived in countries that are now called Denmark and Sweden. Listen to Beowulf in Old English--can you understand any words? Do you want to know more about the famous epic? Click here to go to an interactive site to read more about Beowulf. Click here to watch a video why you SHOULD read Beowulf! Click here for a Glossary of Beowulf Click here to learn more about topics and different sections of the story. Index of Link Material Click here to view some of the things you can find out about in Beowulf for Beginners. This list will help you know where to look. The Family Tree
We know how important it is to teach our students to make inferences when they read. It's a tricky concept, and one that needs to be taught again and again. Students often confusing inferring with making predictions and observations, and some are just confused all together! Som
As I was leaving my son’s classroom the other day after volunteering, I heard the teacher talking to the kids about pronouns. Uh oh, I thought. Knowing how the other parts of speech have been hard for my son to distinguish, I immediately began brainstorming … and Googling. Using a song to identify pronouns wasn’t my idea; it originated from a Prentice Hall series of worksheets I found here. When my son came home, we watched a Schoolhouse Rocks video to jog his memory about what words are pronouns and when/how they’re used. Then I gave him some small pronoun cards, which he put in alphabetical order. Now I played the Roy Orbison song “Running Scared.” (I found it on YouTube. He didn’t watch, but rather just listened.) It was my son’s job to pull out the cards with pronouns he heard in the song. He listened twice to be sure he’d found them all. Then I gave him the lyrics I’d typed up. He circled every occurrence of the pronouns in the song. Lastly, he graphed the pronouns to see which Orbison sang the most. My son LOVES graphing and always treats it like a contest to see which word, number, or object will win. It was a tie! Download a PDF of the pronoun cards and graph here. Click on the lyrics to download them.
Every morning, at the start of our Morning Meeting, we recite our five classroom rules. The rules I use are similar to Whole Brain Teaching's, but with a twist. I use the set from The Polka Dot Patch. You can read all of the specifics on the rules and gestures HERE. Something fun that we do every Friday is reciting the rules in a different voice. It helps keep up the interest and engagement, plus, we all need a laugh Friday morning :) I have seen different fluency practice ideas a lot on Pinterest and I think these would be a wonderful resource for rule-reciting. Sometimes the Meeting Leader has an idea themselves- one girl decided to recite the rules as if we all had a mouth full of food!- but other times, the student may need some inspiration. Find these at I Love 2 Teach! All I am doing is printing these on cardstock, laminating them, and putting a binder ring though a hole in the top corner. I will keep these near our Morning Meeting Bucket and talking ball for our Meeting Leader to use if he/she needs them. Do you have these fluency cards in your class? Try incorporating them into your rule recitation- it's a great way to wrap up the week!
Working on prepositions with your children or students? Download this free eight page prepositions worksheets and resource printable packet.
Make learning how to diagram sentences easier with this diagramming sentences cheat sheet! Learn how to use the different parts of speech and sentences.
Use the train analogy to teach students about subjects and predicates! This blog post contains an anchor chart and several matching activities.
Hi all! I can't believe that it is already OCTOBER. There is so much going on but I'm still loving every second of it. I forgot to po...
Adverbs Anchor Chart Plus, this blog post contains a fun, engaging class book project to do to reinforce the concept!
Coordinating conjunctions connect words, phrases, and clauses. These sentence diagraming exercises will SHOW you how conjunctions work. Join us!
With an abundance of clever crafts, cute bulletin boards, and coordinated decor, Pinterest generates much that is adorable in classrooms. But the meatier stuff is out there, too–if you…
Once a popular way to teach grammar, the practice of diagramming sentences has fallen out of favor.
This parts of speech worksheet is great for teaching your child about interjections and more. Use this parts of speech worksheet to get in gear with grammar.
I have a fun reading resource for you! Book Talk is loaded with ideas to use for retelling stories, comprehending reading, and using books and tools to share some good conversations. Click here for a preview. Students will have plenty to do during reading time. Plus, there are some great homework ideas too! I recently updated this cover and added more graphic organizers and activities to this resource. Here are just a few examples of what's included: Questions to ask partners or questions for parents to ask their child about the book they are reading. It helps start and guide the conversation about books. If you ONLY want the Book Talk Questions, scroll to the bottom of this post. The questions come in a variety of ways. You can get them all on one sheet or on small papers like below. I put a ring on these and students have a ton of questions to ask themselves or with their partner. These are handy and ready to go on a moments notice. You can use these questions for any genre you are reading. This pack includes 5 book reports with directions and rubrics! Just copy and send home for homework projects. This pack has graphic organizers to keep the conversation going through writing. Over 40 graphic organizers included! Also some reading activities for students that finish early or need some more enrichment. One sheet is for partners to do together and one sheet is for the individual learner who can work at their own pace. You will be sure to find some reading logs in this pack too. There is even one for the entire class to keep track of the books you read together as a class. Plus so much more!!! All activities can be used with any book or any reading program you use in the classroom. You can find Book Talk here on my blog for a discounted price: Discounted Price:Sell ebooks If you ONLY want the Book Talk Questions, click the picture on the left. This pack has 10 pages full of questions students should be answering while reading their story. You can only purchase these questions here on my blog. Click to read more about it. If you ONLY want the book reports, Click on the picture below. Book Reports have 4 book reports with directions and a grading rubric. There are also 3 extra reports to use at anytime! You can ONLY buy this on my blog right now. Thanks for stopping by! See you soon,
I Teach. What’s Your Superpower? Teach • Design • Grow
This post was written on November 5, 2011. Our first year of Essentials has proven T-O-U-G-H. It would have been a challenge even if we hadn’t been battling all the noise from the ongoing construction. In the process of learning how to implement Essentials in our own home, I have discovered some ways to make […]
Take a G and an E and O, And add a little R-G-E, To a W-A-S-H, I...N...G If you add 2,000 pounds, That makes a ton, So what have you got? You've got a lot!
Ok, just because I've been gone from 'blogging land' doesn't mean we haven't been working hard in 4B. I've definitely been documenting a lot of what we've been doing! To start, it was clear to me that our old way of peer conferencing just wasn't working. Kids seemed to be goofing around, not really helping each other, and it was a waste of everyone's time. It frustrated me when most of my one-on-one conference time was spent managing unruly PEER conferences. I knew something had to change. I decided to revamp our workshop so that our peer conferences would hold both the author and the peer more accountable AND work on our 6-traits language. I introduced our 'new' method for peer conferencing using this anchor chart to document our process. After students finish drafting, they are to grab a 6-traits peer conferencing sheet and assess themselves by circling all the descriptors for each trait that they feel match their own writing. Mind you, we did a lot of whole-class practice with scoring writing based on the 6-traits criteria so students would feel comfortable doing this process on their own (and being HONEST!). Through our mini-lessons we've learned that it's possible to have high scores in some traits but lower scores in others. That's how we grow! Here you see Devin circling where he thinks his writing falls on our 6-traits rubric. (Note: The link to the 6-traits peer conferencing sheet above will bring you to an even more updated version than the one shown in this blog posting! Just FYI!) Here's another student assessing her own writing after she's drafted. This student has finished assessing her writing using our rubric. She decides on a final number score and circles it to the left of the descriptors. Then it's time to meet with a peer. (We have a peer conference sign-up sheet in our room which helps students know which other students in the room are also ready to peer conference.) Here you see this author reading his story to his peer. After he's done reading, he will explain to his peer the scores he gave himself and why. It's important for the peer to listen carefully to the author because it will soon be her turn to assign a score to this author for each trait . On the lines on the rubric, she will write to explain the scores she gives him. The peer needs to follow the following sentence stems in his/her scoring response: * I give this a writer a ___ because... * This writer needs to work on ... This process requires peers to truly work together, hold each other accountable, and it gets the kids using our 6-traits language a lot more. The second sentence stem helps the writer establish a goal for what to work on when revising! To see more of this peer conferencing process, watch a clip of us practicing this stage! Our focus lately has been on the trait of organization. We've been looking thoroughly at different beginnings and endings of both student and published writing. Here is our anchor chart documenting what we noticed! In other Writer's Workshop news, these are a few additional anchor charts we have in our room to help keep our writing organized. This anchor chart reminds us of powerful words to use to spice up 'said'! In reading we have been working hard on purposeful talk.This is so very important to the social construction of knowledge in any classroom! It's essential to teach students purposeful talk behaviors before even considering literature discussion groups (LDGs). The majority of kids talk like...well, KIDS! So, if we expect kids to talk like mature young people about different texts they read, we need to explicitly teach them how! Talking about Text by Maria Nichols is a great place to start if you're interesting in learning more about purposeful talk behaviors. I taught each of the behaviors individually through two separate mini-lessons - one day to explain 'hearing all voices' in a concrete way (without text), and a second day to practice 'hearing all voices' using text. Then I taught 'saying something meaningful' in a concrete way without using text, and the next day we practiced 'saying something meaningful' using text , and so on. Eventually all of the purposeful talk behaviors kind of blended together and kids started to discover that we often need to use all of these things at the same time in order to truly talk purposefully about anything! We did a lot of practicing, and I've been taping students in this process. Here is a clip of students practicing their behaviors while they talk about their families. (We had read a few books about different kinds of families to foster a safe environment to celebrate the fact that we all have different kinds of families!) We also had students practice their purposeful talk behaviors while discussing their best or worst memory in school (which helped warm up their brains for a timed writing activity we did during writer's workshop). Here is a clip! As a class, we watched these video clips to analyze our body language and other purposeful talk behaviors. I think taping and analyzing is a very effective way for students to learn how they should look and sound in an LDG. 'Keeping the lines of thinking alive' is a tough concept for many youngsters. Sometimes what happens is that students take turns talking, but they don't really build on what the person before them said. In other words, they don't really DISCUSS, they just share and listen. We applauded the first group in this clip because they had good body language and were respectful as listeners, but we discovered their conversation needed to be more 'alive' by asking questions and making connections to each other's ideas and thoughts. Mrs. Pierce and I taped ourselves doing a weak LDG and a strong LDG. As we watched each example, we used dots and lines to 'map out' our conversations (see chart below). In the weak LDG, we discovered Mrs. Pierce and I shared a lot of individual thoughts. The thought started, and then it stopped. There was really no discussion about anything we said; and Mrs. Pierce wasn't even looking at me during part of our time together! How rude! ;) In the strong LDG example, we mapped out a lot of dots and lines that were connected because we took each other's ideas and built on them. We truly discussed the text to dig deeper. We introduced several conversational moves for students to use to help get their voice heard in a conversation. Students also have these conversational moves on a bookmark that they keep in their LDG books. After we learned the respectful ways to speak and act when discussing with others, it was time to teach our kids how to flag their thinking. This is a crucial step to holding a successful literature discussion group because it allows the kids to track their important thoughts while reading so they have ideas for discussion the next day. Here are the 'codes' we use to track our thinking on post-its. We encourage students to use one of our codes to categorize the kind of thought they have and then write a few words to trigger their thought. This helps them when they get into a discussion group; they'll actually have pinpointed ideas to discuss! Students kept a chart in their Thoughtful Logs with all of our codes on it for easy reference. Here's a clip of our students as they practice flagging their thinking for the first time. The next day, students put all their new learning to the test. We put them in small groups to discuss the text "Slower Than the Rest" which is a short realistic fiction story out of Cynthia Rylant's book Every Living Thing. On another day, we used a high-interest two-page non-fiction text about leeches to continue practicing flagging our thoughts. Here's a clip of our kids flagging their thinking just after we modeled it during our mini-lesson. Below are some pictures of the kids' flagged thoughts. In addition to purposeful talk, we've also been studying the historical fiction genre. We've read several mentor texts, including Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner and Dandelions by Eve Bunting. Our first round of literature discussion books are all within the historical fiction genre. Here are a few of our historical fiction LDGs hard at work: Dear Levi: Letters from the Overland Trail Scraps of Time: Abby Takes a Stand The River and the Trace (I think I put my finger over the microphone at minute 2:00!) Oftentimes, historical fiction books will have a flashback in them. One group's book, called A Scrap of Time: Abby Takes a Stand by Patricia McKissick, has a flashback that occurs towards the beginning of the story. I photocopied some of the pages to try to explain this technique during a whole class mini-lesson. In the first section of the book, three grandkids are spending time with their grandma in her attic. They find an old menu and ask their grandma why she saved it. Chapters 1 through 12 flash back to 1960, where 'grandma' is just 10-years-old, living in Nashville, Tennessee at the time of a lot of civil rights protests. The menu is from a restaurant where a lot of sit-ins took place. Through the flashback a reader learns all about life during the 1960s. In the final section of the book, a reader finds him/herself back in the present - in grandma's attic, where the three grandkids ask their grandma some questions about her life during the sixties. There was also another flashback in the story Dakota Dugout by Ann Turner. We also read The Wreck of the Zephyr by Chris VanAllsburg as an example of a flashback in a fantasy book! In other reading news, here is a picture of the anchor chart that stored all the non-fiction text features we've learned. In social studies, we've been studying the economy of the five U.S. regions. Students have been reading small sections of non-fiction leveled readers to summarize a product or industry that is important to each region's economy. Students are typing up their summaries and we're calling those summaries 'articles' as they each create a magazine of our economy. Through this project, students have learned to: * Summarize main ideas * Center and left-justify their cursor * Use the tab key to indent * Change font size, color, and style * Bold, underline, and italicize * Safe image searches * Copy and paste * Cite their picture resources Here is the inside of one student's magazine. Next week we will be using this site to create magazine covers! Lastly, we had a chance to meet with our second-grade buddies earlier this month. We split the buddies up into two groups and one group stayed with Mrs. Adams to play holiday bingo. The other group was with me in the computer lab. Buddies used this site to play a variety of math and English games. One of the most popular games to play was called 'Story Plant' where students could click on different leaves to create the beginning to a unique story. Depending on what leaves were clicked, you would get a different combination of characters, settings, problems, etc. The computer generates a beginning to a story that the kids can print off and finish during writer's workshop! Have a wonderful weekend!
Happy Thursday Friends, Today I found a great linky about teaching phonics from Melissa over at First Grade Smiles . Teaching phoni...
Verbals lessons can involve more than worksheets. Add grammar sorts, online activities, mentor sentences for gerunds, participles, and infinitives.
If you're tired of teaching parts of speech lessons only to have kids forget all about it the next day, try these easy ideas and activities!
Figurative language is one of my favorite topics to teach! I love witnessing students find their creativity and have fun experimenting with different figurative language devices in their writing. I created mini anchor charts to cover some of the most common types of figurative language that are taught in elementary: simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, hyperbole ... Read More about Figurative Language
Some people might think I am crazy, but I just love anchor charts. I think it is the elementary teacher trapped in me. It is rare that we d...
