I want to share an idea that has saved me some sanity in the past two years when many students are demanding my attention at once.
this was written in like 2016-2017 so ignore the outdated references 😟😟 Collection of lgbtq+ tumblr posts
Hi there lovely humans! It feels like the year so far is just flying by and I hope you're all doing well and taking care of yourselves. The last few months have been so good. I've really made my mental health a priority and the changes I see in myself and in my life have
When you're tired of being heartbroken in the wrong relationship, find the strength to walk away with these I can't do this anymore quotes.
Like vs. Love
So, we’re half-way through our work week and I felt that sharing the ADHD Diet sheet would be a good idea to try and get everyone through to Friday. Like I mentioned in this post, my husband …
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I want you to know that it's normal to be lonely. It's normal to have a hard time making friends. In this world, for some reason, romance is sensationalized above all else. I wonder where the message of friendship went. I wonder at what age 'will you be my friend?' is lost from our vocabulary in exchange for cryptic hints. I feel like we were taught a million ways to be 'a good girlfriend' but so few around how to be 'a good friend.'This is what I am learning: real friendship takes work. Often times, deep work. The soul searching kind. The idea that we might be able to own each other persists in romance and family but seldom in friendship, which makes it a special kind of intentional. I spoke yesterday about constancy, the magic of anyone or anything that shows up on a regular basis. Well, that's a gift. ... - Watermark is for preview only - Includes digital artist signature
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!
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Last week in reading, we introduced figurative language. We will dive into all of the sub-categories of figurative language (including similes/metaphors, idioms, exaggerations, hyperboles, etc.) this coming week. I used this anchor chart to demonstrate the literal meaning and the author's meaning of "a frown that breaks rocks" - a phrase from one of our mentor texts. (Please don't judge my frown with big muscles. I've never claimed to be a good artist!) When students came to the carpet for our lesson, I had them each bring a post-it on a hard surface and a pencil. For guided practice, I paired students up and asked them to draw the literal and author's meaning for the following phrase from one of our mentor texts: "Slowly dusk pours the syrup of darkness into the forest." Students who had to draw the literal meaning for this phrase came up first. Each student described what they drew. We saw a lot of pictures of dusk with real hands squeezing an actual syrup bottle over the top of trees in a forest. Two of the pictures had other trees asking, "Where are the waffles!" It made us laugh and truly helped to establish that we can't always take author's words literally when we read. Understanding figurative language means we need to think beyond the literal meaning of words. I was pleased to see that the author's meaning drawings students made for "slowly dusk pours the syrup of darkness into the forest" didn't have any actual syrup bottles in them. Students simply drew a peaceful forest getting darker. As a class, we wrote out in words the literal meaning and the author's meaning for our phrase. For independent practice, students returned to their desks and glued the following chart into their Author's Craft section of their Thoughtful Logs. Students drew a picture and wrote out in words the literal meaning and the author's meaning for the phrase: "a laugh that creates tidal waves..." In other news, we have been working on pre-writing, drafting, editing, and publishing our Mother's Day projects. For the sake of wanting to surprise any of our mothers who follow our blog, I'm going to refrain from posting too many pictures of what we're doing so that I don't completely give away what your little munchkins will be giving you. Here they are in the publishing process: Last week, we also worked on writing our thank you cards to the Jefferson County Courthouse and the Kutz Farm for letting us visit and learn about government and agriculture. I printed off several pictures from our field trips and each student used one of the pictures on each of their cards to kind of 'personalize' our experience at each place. Prior to writing, we reviewed the parts of a friendly letter, in addition to a topic sentence, three supporting detail sentences, and a closing sentence for a strong paragraph. Lastly, Nina was our Person of the Week last week. She brought in her dog, Meatball!So tiny and so very cute. :)
A Tumblr post from an English lit geek has gone viral and you'd be surprised how much we owe Shakespeare.
