Laptops produce quite a bit of heat, so if you’re in the habit of using your laptop on your lap, you’re potentially overheating the sperm factory.
The twenty-four stories of this new collection of climate fiction seek to imagine what cities might look like in a future of multi-species co-existence and green justice.
Greta Thunberg, a 15-year-old student from Sweden, captured the attention of the world recently when she shamed climate change negotiators at a United Nations climate summit in Poland.
To keep the anchor charts that I have been teaching out on display I have added a space in the back of my classroom to display them. I have hot glued clothes pins to the wall so I can easily clip them up and change them out to keep them on display. Since I have started to make more and more anchor charts I had to think of a way to store them. I have used hooks and hangers to hang them up. I also printed out labels to easily find the charts I am looking for.
This Reading Poster Pack features 41 different COLOR anchor charts about all things reading. The posters cover: ♥ Story Elements (e.g. plot, setting, problem, solution, characters etc.) ♥ Reading Strategies (e.g. inferring, summarizing, predicting, synthesizing etc.) ♥ Author’s Purpose (e.g. persuade, entertain, inform) ♥ Text Connections (text-to-text, text-to-self, text-to-world). ♥ And much more (e.g. fiction/non-fiction texts, cause & effect, main idea, fact or opinion etc.) There are a number of posters covering the above components. The posters include definitions, sentence starters. They are great for display around the classroom and I have found students often refer to them during guided reading activities. Note: These posters are in COLOR. Specifications: Comes in both a USA Version and an Australian/UK Version. Please see the preview for more details.
Do you have parents of students in your classroom asking, "How can I help my child?" I will be sending these printables home at the beginning of the school year. Head on over to my blog to find out how you can downloaded these for FREE!
Earlier this month, I shared a mnemonic I use with my 2nd and 3rd graders for teaching story elements. This mnemonic is part of a larger strategy called 'Picture It!,' developed by Victoria Naughton (2008). Each letter of S.T.O.R.Y. represents a story element, and students can use the graphic mnemonic for identifying and visualizing the common features of fiction texts. Learn more about this great strategy here! S.T.O.R.Y. Poem Many people make up a silly stories or poems to increase retention. I am one of those people. :) According to Brain Training 101's article How to Improve Your Memory, 'A mnemonic device, such
Are we designing inequality into our genes?
What are the different types of bilingualism in children, and separating the bilingualism Facts from Fiction
Hello Everyone! I am going to be quick today as I have a ton of studying to do for my ESL Certification, and tomorrow is Valentine's Day! I've got a lot to do to get ready for the festivities and love!! Our "Friendship Celebration" should be a lot of fun!! Anyway, today we worked hard on the main differences between fiction and nonfiction books. We talked about the kinds of pictures, words, elements, and the reason for reading both genres. We made this anchor chart to help us remember. With all these differences in mind, our next job was to sort through a mound of animal books. Each kiddo chose several books to look through and deposit into two different groups, fiction and non fiction. They did a perfect job!!! Way to go guys!!! Now on to using the nonfiction selections to reasearch!! Thanks for stopping by to take a quick peek into our wonder-filled world! See you soon! Now, bring on the chocolate!! Joyfully, Nancy
Marrying your first cousin, while illegal in many states, is not the worst thing you could do. But the situation gets hairy (read: birth defects) if you trace the pattern through a family's genealogy.
How habits of speech can shape our thoughts.
While on a trip recently, I doodled this idea for a poster activity: The purpose is to help kids focus on descriptive sensory language in what they are reading. When they find an example of a sight, sound, taste, smell, or touch-related detail, they will record it in the corresponding area of their poster. The poster can be used with any text of reasonable length such as a magazine article as well as fiction or informational books. Here is a sample of the poster already filled in: As they read, students will record words or phrases that relate to the 5 senses— rough fence; everyone stares; flavor of grass; sniffs the air; listens for the cow bell— or write a short summary as shown above to give more context. There's also a vertical version included which you can see in the lower right of the cover: Click to see 5 Senses Read & Write in my TpT shop. Another new item is this Owl Combo Pack of Whooo's In Our Class? get-to-know-you foldable plus Owls Are All Write! Graphic Organizers and Writing Papers. Though this is discounted already, it will be included in the sale. The same goes for the Similes Classroom Books Combo Pack: Similes & Meanings has 30 familiar similes for kids to illustrate, while Simile Starters has 30 prompts for students to write new, original similes. We're Nuts About Goals! is a fun craftivity for kiddos to learn about setting goals as early as Kindergarten. They don't even have to be able to write, they can just draw pictures on the acorns. Learning how to set and achieve goals can make all the difference in life so it's an important concept for all students. Age-appropriate goals could include: Learning a specific new skill Meeting a particular Common Core State Standard Following a class rule Improving a certain behavior Trying new things Reading X number of books Practicing something a certain length of time per/day or week As always, my classroom resources including the graphics are original creations by me. Speaking of graphics, this Apple Frames FREEBIE has gotten a ton of downloads and great feedback already: To make it easier for teachers to find my freebies, there is now a Freebie Category in my shop. To find the newest resources, click on the Most Recent link on the main store page or the NEW! category. These are most of the "newbie" resources in my shop. I love making classroom resources so more are on the way! Loreen My web site
On linguistics and language development in speculative fiction, with linguistics expert Christina Dalcher.
Kinderbücher und Diversity! Ich stelle Kinderbücher über Vielfalt, Toleranz, Inklusion und generellem Anders-sein vor.
I can't believe that a week has come and gone. With the new month, I have started working with my 6th graders on Fictional Narratives. I HAVE decided that I am going to take a couple of months on this genre and REALLY get into the nitty gritty of it. We have been studying the structure of fictional narratives, reading mentor texts, and talking about what we read during the day from a "writer's perspective". It is really fun to hear the kids start to talk about the things they read as a writer! For my bulletin board, I had my amazing wife do all the writing for me. I got the purpose (top left corner), the title, and of course... THE ANCHOR CHARTS started and posted. Because I am taking it slow and covering the concept in depth, I am still working on teaching the lessons that will fill in all the anchor chart spaces, and I am working to do those quickly- but with understanding. However, we just had a mini-lesson on the framework of a fictional narrative and the students drew the anchor chart in their journals. It took a little while, but I love that they have mini-charts in their notebooks. Shoot! I should have taken a picture of a student notebook. They did such a great job with them! My wife made this poster sized one for my board. I really like how it turned out! I also love that since I started at the back of the chart book and am moving forward, the anchor chart for Personal Memoirs is still accessible to the students by simply lifting up the paper (as shown below)! I love when I have good ideas (because they don't seem to happen as often as I would like). As we continue through our journey with Fictional Narratives, I will continue to share what we do so you can enjoy the journey with me. Today, we worked on studying mentor texts and writing rules for punctuating dialogue. We found that there are four different ways that dialogue is written. We will have our anchor chart made by the end of tomorrow and my wife will take my sloppy copy and make it a thing of beauty- THEN I will share it with you. I am excited to take the adventure with my students. I realize that the new core standards want us to focus on and push non-fiction reading and writing, and I will, but I feel that I need to get them excited about writing FIRST and then we can move on to those other concepts. Writing ROCKS! Cheers! -MrHughes
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!
Classroom & teaching tips, ideas, freebies, and resources for elementary teachers.
The traditional values of a nation can be lost in one generation, and we are losing America now. The future depends upon what your kids are being taught now.
This book list features fiction texts that have a clear problem and solution structure to them, perfect for teaching fiction comprehension and writing!
Instantly access The Last Cuentista plus over 40,000 of the best books & videos for kids.
The border guard studied the identity papers Adamonis had kept hidden through his escape out of shattered Russia, looking from his photo to his face, from his photo to his face. He told Adamonis to…
