I love otters and they love each other too. * See two more of my otter posts: Sea Otters Holding Hands Cutest Otter Baby Ever
Katrina Miller still remembers the first time she felt him. It was four years ago, a mysterious man arrived at the hospital that she was working for at night. She was suddenly forced to "take care of" him. The man waited for her on the bed like a demon crouching at night, rushing to tear her apart. His strong and hot body was on her, driving her crazy. It lasted three nights in a row and Katrina l...
Hey Guys! So, today I decided to do another one of my new posts, and this one is going to be based on books similar to one of my favorite books. The first book I decided to do is A Discovery Of Wit…
If these next 3 months of school aren't the BEST time of the year, than I'm not sure what is...well ok there is this one day called the l...
Class Rules Posters - Famous Quotes - Creative Back to School Bulletin Board: Grab your students' attention with these unique back-to-school classroom rules posters that blend famous quotes from celebrated figures in history with essential classroom rules. The posters look great on display on a classroom bulletin board, but they also are a great reminder of important rules that they must follow in the classroom. Each of the six posters features a quote from a famous person which relates directly to a classroom rule. This is included in our best-selling bundle: >>> Back to School Resource Bundle Included in the Class Rules Posters Back to School Bulletin Board: ➡️ 6 Back to School Classroom Rules Posters: These 6 ready-to-print posters not only look great on display, but they are also visual reminders of the most important classroom rules. Each poster includes a famous quote that connects to a classroom rule. The quotes feature the following prominent figures: William Shakespeare, Martin Luther King Jr., Benjamin Franklin, Amelia Earhart, Emily Dickinson, and Nelson Mandela! ➡️ Black and White Versions: Don't have access to a color printer? No problem! Simply download and print our black and white versions that also look great on display on a classroom bulletin board. ➡️ Our Class Rules Title Banner: Your purchase also includes a long title banner that reads, "Our Class Rules." Simply print the pages on standard-sized paper and attach them to form the banner! ➡️ Editable Template: Want to add your own posters with other famous figures? An editable PowerPoint template is included for you to create other posters with your favorite quotes (for personal use only). What Teachers Are Saying About The Class Rules Posters Back to School Bulletin Board: ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I absolutely love this product and wish I had thought of it myself! My principal loved it too - always a good thing! ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ My 8th graders love this! It was such a great conversation starter for the first week of school ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ I personally loved these and my students thought they were cool on the first day when we used them to go over class expectations. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ These are going to be great for my 7th and 8th grade ELA classes. Love the combination of rules with great quotes from wonderful writers/speakers. If you like this, you'll love our most popular poster set: >>> English is Weird Classroom Posters © Presto Plans ➡️ Want 10 free ELA resources sent to your inbox? Click here! ⭐️ Follow Presto Plans on TpT to see what's new and on sale.
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!
Who is sick of the weather temp screenshots, hashtags about ____beria and overall complaining about how people are so sick of winter? Obviously I’m not…(that’s a joke). Friends, w…
For your reading convenience, I'm gathering them into a May 2020 guest post sampler. Enjoy these previews of the posts, then click on the "read more" link.
“Last night I lost the world, and gained the universe.” — C. JoyBell C. Even after you let go, the past is still part of who you are. Every one of us lives in the present and makes choices based o…
This young lawyer knows she needs to become a better communicator -- but how? We found the best books to help her become a master communicator.
1. Blue hydrangeas in vases. We have one blue hydrangea in our yard, growing practically underneath the trampoline. That is a sad place for a hydrangea to
I'm back! I totally apologize to all my readers for disappearing for the last couple of months. I took my first real grad class this fall and had no time to breathe. Something had to give and unfortunately it was my blog. But, the class is over and I am back! I have so much to tell you but instead of one long post, be looking for short posts over the next week or so to catch you up! The class I took was TONS of work but also very rewarding. In Massachusetts, if you have even one student in your class who is and English Language Learner, you need to take a class called Rethinking Equity and Teaching for English Language Learners (RETELL). It's basically an intro to ELL and walks you through tried and true activities that helps ELLs succeed in the classroom. Being my second year in district, I found the class to be EXTREMELY helpful and my biggest takeaway is direct vocabulary instruction. I have always felt that vocabulary is such an important part of teaching social studies and last year I just knew I wasn't cutting it. My students were just understanding vocabulary on the most superficial of levels and I knew it was because I was teaching a population I had never really experienced before. In the class they taught us a vocabulary activity called the Seven Steps to preteach vocabulary. Here is a fabulous example of Seven Steps from an elementary teacher: I knew this was exactly what I needed but I decided to tweak it for my class. Now, almost every day, my kiddos walk in and we preteach a word or term they are going to need in order to understand the upcoming content (Tier 2 and Tier 3 Words). We do it in the same order every day: Introduce word and have them pronounce it twice. Ask if they know anything about the word and identify and prefixes, suffixes, and/or base words. Have them write down a student friendly definition. Tell them how we are going to use it in content. I also like to tell them how it is used in other contexts (for the word "convention" this week, we talked about the Constitutional Convention but we also talked about ComicCon). I show the kids a YouTube video that better illustrates the word or a visual. Lastly, the students are given a sentence stem that they need to finish with the students in their table groups. We then share out as a class. This method has truly revolutionized my class! Not only are the kids truly understanding the vocabulary, it has allowed me to frontload my teaching. As an example, I taught the term Articles of Confederation three days before we really learned about the Articles of Confederation. The kids absolutely love it and have been acing their vocab quizzes like champs. They can use the words weeks later in a sentence and I really feel like it has helped me make bigger connections in my content. I showed two different videos with this term. The first clip, I explained to them, is how the British knew how to fight and the second video was how the Americans learned to fight from the native Americans. We were able to compare and contrast the two styles and this whole lesson took less than ten minutes of my class. If you're interested, I have started to gather together these vocab lessons and have made them available on Teachers Pay Teachers. https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/Mesopotamia-and-First-Civilizations-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1675580 https://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Product/American-Revolution-Direct-Daily-Vocabulary-Instruction-1672787 Head on over to TPT to check these out and look for more as I progress in the year!
Finding good books to read can be tough. When you get hooked on a series, you don’t have to worry about finding your next great book; you can just enjoy
Are your inlaws arriving soon for an extended stay? Here are some of my top tips for surviving in-law visits.
"When people start to meditate or to work with any kind of spiritual discipline, they often think that somehow they're going to improve." ~ Pema Chodron
Over the past few years, I have fallen in love with anchor charts but I'll be the first to admit that my drawing skills are about on the level of a 2nd grader. I'm terrible at them so I decided to make these fun ones instead. Kids need visuals. It is that simple. I have always had anchor charts displayed somewhere my classroom for kids to reference the skills we are currently working on. They are perfect for a focus wall. This set of helpful anchor charts cover the comprehension, vocabulary, and fluency skills that we work on in 2nd grade but could also cover other grade levels as well. It includes 45 colored and black and white posters. Each poster includes a visual image and a kid friendly definition. Print them smaller (2 to a page) to save on ink. You could print, laminate and place on a ring for students to reference throughout the year. They also come in black and white version for a printer friendly option. AstroBrights Paper (affiliate link) makes everything more fun. These can also be used in a journal to introduce and review skills. Print the posters smaller (2-4 to a page), glue into a journal and then show understanding or examples underneath. The charts you don't use, just tuck away for when you can or place them in a center for review. You can grab these in my TeachersPayTeachers store by clicking here. Looking for some engaging activities for your literacy block? Check out my Reading and Writing Pinterest board for some great ideas.
