Parent Treat by A First For Everything Parent communication and encouragement is a must! This week during conferences, I used some free...
It's time to link up with my friend Julie from A First For Everything for the highs and lows of my week. My high for the week is that I got to spend some time with my fabulous new team. I made it through about half of their rooms to take pictures. Look at how cute they are! Hollywood Themed Classroom Hollywood Themed Classroom Peacock Classroom Student Work Camping Themed Classroom Camping Themed Classroom Sports Themed Classroom The Best Year Ever Teacher Shirt It was a definite high of the week when one of my former students brought me this awesome shirt. The low was that my Gators didn't get a chance to play because of a weather cancellation!
Parent Treat by A First For Everything Parent communication and encouragement is a must! This week during conferences, I used some free...
Parent Treat by A First For Everything Parent communication and encouragement is a must! This week during conferences, I used some free...
One of the largest problems that I have to solve each year in my classroom is how to teach social studies. We are given very little resources for social studies and no time in our schedule!!!! How about you? Last year I decided to really focus on how to integrate social studies into our day, teach the students the best lessons available and appease the powers that be as best I could. The first task was to find books that I could build a social studies library with. While I can't afford every book in this post, I tried to focus on a few key ones and check the rest out from the library when needed. If one can be addicted to books then I'm certainly addicted to True Books. They are perfect for 2nd and 3rd grade. The students are drawn to the vivid photographs making them a hit for everyone. I purchased one from every native American region for my students to read. If you are interested, try to purchase them used on Amazon. Prime members get some used books shipped for free. Each book ran around $4 with library binding. That's right library binding. They are sure to last a long time. Most of them look brand new. If they didn't look brand new they had just a bit of wear. Only having one book for students is an issue. To overcome this we split the class into groups and have each one study a tribe. We then came together and debrief with classroom conversation and show projects that we have worked on. Samuel Eaton and Sarah Morton are always a hit with students. The vivid photographs capture their attention. "The Thirteen Colonies"s is a great book, but not as captivating as Samuel and Sarah. I haven't purchased "Land of the Pilgrims' Pride" with Ellis the elephant, but it's next on my list. If you have it would you please leave a comment on how you like it? "The Name Jar" and "Grandfather's Journey" are both great books that tell stories of immigration. I have a feeling I'll be collecting the entire collection of Ellis the Elephant books this year. "How to Behave and Why" is a fabulous book that explains why we follow rules. It's not fancy, but it does a great job of explaining the content. The biography books by Meltzer do a nice job of showing contributions by exceptional citizens. There is a whole series so you could pick one near and dear to you. Finding the perfect book on economics for children is an arduous task!!!! The books on the bottom row have the exact content to teach students. They are written on a lower level, but sometimes it's nice to have a quick read that does the job. Have you found a book on mapping that you can't live without? This is a tough subject to write on. I used "Mapping Penny's World" and "Follow That Map!" last year. They got the job done. If I had to have one book with symbols, "America" is a good one. It has a lot of nice illustrations that show symbols. It's hard to suggest culture books when there are so many. I try to focus on informational text that engages students and explains the basics of the culture. We didn't have enough time in our school year to study a meaningful amount of cultures last year so we came up with a plan. My grade level held a culture fair. Each class studied a different country. The students then got to rotate through the classes to learn about different ones. It was a great way to increase learning and engagement within a short time span. Aside from finding books to use I also had to write lessons that ran about 20 minutes each. We needed to have materials that were hands-on, engaging and explicit. I worked all year to develop lesson suggestions and materials that fit my student's needs and helped them to master the content. If you don't have time to do this, you can click on the link below to visit my store and materials.
Are you in need of an expensive student gift? This one cost me $3 for 30 ornaments. You can personalize them with a vinyl cutter or by...
The kids loved their hands-on time with inferencing this week! Inferencing Books Monday Monday I read a short story (pictureless) to them and we made a graphic organizer whole group. We put our evidence in one column. Showed our schema in the next column and placed our inference in the third. This chart is shown to the right of my word wall below. I apologize for the picture. This was the only picture that I had of the anchor. Inferencing Anchor Tuesday On Tuesday we read Henry and Mudge and made another class graphic organizer. This time we went down to a t-chart. We included evidence and our inference. After we worked as a class, we paired off and students rotated through inference bags. They were able to make t-charts in their reading notebooks to organize their information. Inferencing Bags Wednesday On Wednesday I read them a poem and they worked in a group to make inferences. They recorded their answers on a t-chart in their notebook. Afterwards, they went back into pairs to work through the inferencing bags. Inferencing Bags Thursday On Thursday we worked with wordless books. I modeled using "The Red Book". Afterwards, each group was given one book and they worked together to make inferences throughout. My planning partner Amanda, tabbed places in each book for them. The tabs were to show them great pages to infer. They did a wonderful job. The Red Book Friday Assessment day! Tests don't have to be boring or scary. On Friday I put "The Red Book" on the document camera. They used a t-chart to make inferences throughout. I was so proud that they each made an inference. One cutie even used her Writing Office to reference a contraction. Love her! Writing Offices Here's what they did every day: Every day they have to use the skill that we learned in shared reading during their independent reading time. So while they read, they also made inferences from their books. I met with them all individually to check in on them. These personal conferences helped me to gauge how much modeling I needed to do each day. Here are some other ideas that we didn't get to: There are quite a few inferencing lessons in Comprehension Connections. I love these lessons. I know that I had taught them the lessons last year in first grade so I went another route. We considered covering a Big Book and having them infer as you rip one piece of the paper off the cover at a time. My planning partner Amanda used the inferencing images to make a poster. Inferencing Work Inferencing Work A big thank you goes to Amanda who worked so hard to help me plan these lessons. The thank you will be continued through the year being that we will do it every week! Also thank you to Annie for sending me the pictures!
The kids LOVED our character traits kick-off lesson this week! They each did an amazing job. To start the week off I explained to the kids that character traits were words that could describe us on the inside or outside. After brainstorming positive traits I had the kids make their own character traits on personal busts. This lesson led into more character trait lessons with picture books. Students were able to describe a character's actions in the beginning of a book through the end of the book. After they describe how the character changed or completed a character analysis. Character Traits With Mrs. Labrasciano After introducing personal character traits, we moved into Wemberly Worried. I have a student who is just like Wemberly! This was a great opportunity to help them through their anxiety and work on our comprehension at the same time. The kids love to put together projects so I made them a folder activity that helped us to see how Wemberly changes in the book. Wemberly Worried Wemberly Worried
Parent Treat by A First For Everything Parent communication and encouragement is a must! This week during conferences, I used some free...
I'm so excited to participate in Tailor Made Teaching 's Summer Blog Hop. We end every year with kid created t-shirts in my classroom...
I'm so excited to participate in Tailor Made Teaching 's Summer Blog Hop. We end every year with kid created t-shirts in my classroom...
Communication In The Classroom with Mrs. Labrasciano Every teacher knows the feeling of standing in front of a class, delivering a lesson and then quickly coming to the understanding that most of the class has no idea what they said. We go through the lesson in our heads and sometimes we may wonder, WHAT WENT WRONG?????? Often times it's not just one aspect of the delivery that went asunder, but instead a lot of factors that play into communication within a classroom. Over 400 languages are spoken in the school system of The United States. That's a lot for any teacher to keep up with. Couple these languages with different learning styles and learning disabilities and we have a big task at hand. Thankfully for us, visual communication is universal. Below you will find suggestions for communicating within the class that will benefit all students and ensure student comprehension. CHAMPS Clear communication with visual cues and consistency can help students to understand what is expected of them. This provides a sense of security for the students that allows them to focus on learning. In the pictures above and below, you will see a CHAMP model. It stands for Communication, Help, Activity, Movement and Participation. This model was adapted from the book CHAMPS: A Proactive and Positive Approach To Classroom Management. You can see in the top picture how each letter is introduced to the students. Below you will see that each option has a picture with it so that students who may not have complete language acquisition yet get a visual representation of what is expected of them. The only pictures missing are for Participation. Our report card has four options for primary students: Excellent, Satisfactory, Needs Improvement and Unsatisfactory. For each lesson students brainstorm what is expected of them and come up with a rubric. After they brainstorm the rubric, the teacher writes it on the board with the "E,S,and N" letters. Discussing this CHAMP model before work is started allows the students to have a firm grasp on what is expected of them. This helps assure clear communication with the students. It also helps students to understand where their report card grades come from. CHAMPS Another way of communicating with students through pictures is to allow the students to have copies of anchor charts in a notebook. This is a great way for students to reference what they are learning. In the picture below, you will see an example of one anchor chart. I included a picture within the anchor chart to help with student comprehension. Students tab the pages with the topic of the anchor chart so that they can reference it at a later date if needed. Personal Anchor Charts Below you will find an anchor chart that stays up in the classroom for communicating expectations of writing conventions. Writing can be difficult for all students. It is exceptionally difficult for students acquiring the language or with learning disabilities. Students have a big task at hand. They have to understand sentence structure, conventions and vocabulary meaning. Pictures, color cues and highlighting are used to draw attention to important aspects of writing in the anchor chart below. Classroom Communication You may notice in the picture below and throughout this post that students are given a lot of personal resources to communicate learning objectives. This decision to give them personal resources allows them to focus on the task at hand. It lessens the information coming from other sources helping to keep the objective clear to the students. It also helps to keep the learning environment free of clutter so that the students feel at ease. Feeling safe, secure and at ease helps the students to focus on learning. Personal Writing Offices Building Vocabulary Vocabulary is another big factor in communication within the classroom. Building vocabulary is a must for any successful class. In order to help with communication and comprehension in lessons, I build background knowledge of vocabulary. You can do this by starting with a simple lesson on a certain topic. Some examples are shown in the pictures above and below. Above you will see the students learning about butterflies. Below you will see a sports theme. The subsequent lessons to the butterfly lesson will include butterflies. However, the objective of the lesson will change from vocabulary to another standard. Now that students feel comfortable with butterfly vocabulary, they will be able to focus on comprehending the text's main idea or another objective. Once the students have a schema for a certain topic, you can increase lesson complexity with success! Building Vocabulary Tackling all aspects of communication within one post would be next to impossible. I hope that I have given you some tips that you can take back to your classroom. Please leave any questions that you have in the comment field. If you would like to read more about how students communicate with one another in my classroom you can read my post on Classroom Discussion over on my collaborative blog The Primary Pack.
It's time to link up with my friend Julie from A First For Everything for the highs and lows of my week. My high for the week is that I got to spend some time with my fabulous new team. I made it through about half of their rooms to take pictures. Look at how cute they are! Hollywood Themed Classroom Hollywood Themed Classroom Peacock Classroom Student Work Camping Themed Classroom Camping Themed Classroom Sports Themed Classroom The Best Year Ever Teacher Shirt It was a definite high of the week when one of my former students brought me this awesome shirt. The low was that my Gators didn't get a chance to play because of a weather cancellation!
I'm so excited to participate in Tailor Made Teaching 's Summer Blog Hop. We end every year with kid created t-shirts in my classroom...
A great way to get your students to buy into their learning is to let them choose their topic to learn about. As a closing to our sym...
The kids loved their hands-on time with inferencing this week! Inferencing Books Monday Monday I read a short story (pictureless) to them and we made a graphic organizer whole group. We put our evidence in one column. Showed our schema in the next column and placed our inference in the third. This chart is shown to the right of my word wall below. I apologize for the picture. This was the only picture that I had of the anchor. Inferencing Anchor Tuesday On Tuesday we read Henry and Mudge and made another class graphic organizer. This time we went down to a t-chart. We included evidence and our inference. After we worked as a class, we paired off and students rotated through inference bags. They were able to make t-charts in their reading notebooks to organize their information. Inferencing Bags Wednesday On Wednesday I read them a poem and they worked in a group to make inferences. They recorded their answers on a t-chart in their notebook. Afterwards, they went back into pairs to work through the inferencing bags. Inferencing Bags Thursday On Thursday we worked with wordless books. I modeled using "The Red Book". Afterwards, each group was given one book and they worked together to make inferences throughout. My planning partner Amanda, tabbed places in each book for them. The tabs were to show them great pages to infer. They did a wonderful job. The Red Book Friday Assessment day! Tests don't have to be boring or scary. On Friday I put "The Red Book" on the document camera. They used a t-chart to make inferences throughout. I was so proud that they each made an inference. One cutie even used her Writing Office to reference a contraction. Love her! Writing Offices Here's what they did every day: Every day they have to use the skill that we learned in shared reading during their independent reading time. So while they read, they also made inferences from their books. I met with them all individually to check in on them. These personal conferences helped me to gauge how much modeling I needed to do each day. Here are some other ideas that we didn't get to: There are quite a few inferencing lessons in Comprehension Connections. I love these lessons. I know that I had taught them the lessons last year in first grade so I went another route. We considered covering a Big Book and having them infer as you rip one piece of the paper off the cover at a time. My planning partner Amanda used the inferencing images to make a poster. Inferencing Work Inferencing Work A big thank you goes to Amanda who worked so hard to help me plan these lessons. The thank you will be continued through the year being that we will do it every week! Also thank you to Annie for sending me the pictures!
Part of our social studies standards are to learn how cultures from around the world affect our culture. There's no better way to start this standard than to learn about cultures from around the world. The problem for me was how to teach the students about several cultures within the time that we had available. This is when I thought of a cultural fair. I talked my team into teaching each of their classes about a different country and some of the different cultures within that country. We had the students research: food, art, music, clothing, customs, and language. Each class put together a science board with some of the research. We also hung other research on the walls outside of our classrooms. This way the students had plenty of room to read about the different cultures. We chose to hold the fair the day before Thanksgiving break. The cultural fair was so engaging, the students were sure to learn all the way through the end of the day. We weren't so sure that would happen with our every day lessons. Each class prepared one of the more popular food or drinks from their country. I bought prepackaged food from Ikea for my country. This helps to satisfy the rule in some schools of prepackaged food. The year before we had a parent make our food at home. (I did not serve the pear drink.) Each classroom can have a quick craft inside for the students to complete. We made floral headbands for Sweden. Most countries have flowers in their culture so this is a wonderful go to craft. If you search on Pinterest, you will find a plethora of cultural crafts. We also used the folders that you see below to hold all of our research in reading and writing. Every student was given a passport with the countries listed inside. The students were to record details from every country that they visited. So we allowed students to roam the hall. They went into the rooms to enjoy food and a craft. They read information on the countries outside of the rooms. Their teachers held them accountable for details by checking their passports. We had parent volunteers to come in to assist the students in moving throughout the hall and into the appropriate rooms. If you can't do a whole grade level Culture Fair, you can set up centers in your classroom. You can have groups of students research different countries and share with each other. Putting together the materials for this unit took quite a while. If you don't have time to put them together, check out the units below in my store.
Parent Treat by A First For Everything Parent communication and encouragement is a must! This week during conferences, I used some freebies from my good friend Julie from A First For Everything. The parents really took notice of our small gesture. They also loved the extra parent literature that we left next to the mints. Parent Teacher Conference by A First For Everything This week our progress reports coincided with Parent/Teacher Conferences. This was a specific request from the teachers. We wanted to be able to speak with the parents about the progress their kids were making early on in the year so that we could set the pace for the rest of the year. Just like everyone else, I found myself to be overwhelmed. Progress Alert Folders by More Time To Teach Our district requires that we send progress alerts out for the students who are performing below expectations. However, I send a report home with every student. Keeping communication up with parents, shows the parents that you care about their child. It helps to ease any fears that they may have from the unknown. It may help to show them that there is a potential problem. Every student has something that they can work on to be a better student. This is important to communicate with parents. Parent Progress Alerts by More Time 2 Teach My good friend Melissa from More Time 2 Teach has a great freebie that allowed me to put together a Progress Alert Folder to send home with each child. It tells the parents exactly where their child is and where they need to be at the end of every quarter. I staple any testing data that is acquired into the folder throughout the year. At the end of the year this folder goes onto the next teacher. They can then see exactly how the student progressed through the year and how the parents commented. Another benefit of having these folders is that you have all of the student's data at hand. You can use these at conferences, meetings about the child and report card time. Progress Alert by More Time 2 Teach Progress Alert by More Time 2 Teach Progress Alert Folders Parent Teacher Conference Forms Parent Notes
Today I'll be linking up with two of my favorite bloggers for our top Pinterest picks!!! Thank you PAWSitively Teaching and Inspired Owl's Corner for hosting this. This first idea comes from First Grade Blue Skies . It's super cute, easy and eye catching. Everything that the busy teacher wants in a holiday board!!!! I was turned on to this second idea because Miss Peluso's Kindergarten posted it on Instagram. The post came from Scribble Shop. We plan on doing these cards in class to accompany our TBA Christmas presents. My teaching partner is in charge of those this year!!!! We will make one template, copy it on card stock and have the kids print away. Thank you Gina for the idea:) Last, but not least, photo ideas!!! We are a last minute family when it comes to the extras like cute Christmas photos. You'll have to follow me on Instagram to see which pose we choose.
It's time to link up with my friend Julie from A First For Everything for the highs and lows of my week. My high for the week is that I got to spend some time with my fabulous new team. I made it through about half of their rooms to take pictures. Look at how cute they are! Hollywood Themed Classroom Hollywood Themed Classroom Peacock Classroom Student Work Camping Themed Classroom Camping Themed Classroom Sports Themed Classroom The Best Year Ever Teacher Shirt It was a definite high of the week when one of my former students brought me this awesome shirt. The low was that my Gators didn't get a chance to play because of a weather cancellation!
Need a quick bat craft or Venn diagram for the classroom? I came up with this one to compare and contrast bat books. 1. Cut 2 circles out per student. I used my circle cutter. It was a very wise $10 investment. I can cut out a class set in under 5 minutes. 2. Students cut one of the circles in half and glue on as wings. 3. Have students add a face. It's really that quick and simple!
Anxiety among children is on the rise. We, as teachers, don't need a study to tell us this because we see it every day in the classroom. Splat the Cat is a great book to start a conversation about how we can handle anxiety. Watch the video below to see how to tie this book into standards. Be sure to check out my post on teacher anxiety if you think it will help. If you are experiencing teacher anxiety, check out this post.
The end is near friends. We have 15 days of school left and I am teacher tired. The next three weeks of plans are going to be engaging, quick and simple. No grading will be done because all students who follow directions and behave will have speaking standards and crafts. Students who don't behave will have to write loooooooong summaries. So you see it's best to just listen to Mrs. Labrasciano and have fun. The crafts I've created are quick and easy so that students can work on them independently. The materials are inexpensive because I, like all teachers this time of year am BROKE. Check back next week for one more week of fairy tale fun and end of the year thematic units!! This craft was created with a paper plate, google eyes, red paper and a crown template. For bellwork I will have students paint one side of the paper plate. It's quick and easy because you just squeeze the paint on the plate. The plates will dry within the hour and the students will paint the other side after reading "The Frog Prince". Once the second side dries students will fold the plate in half, add the eyes, tongue and nose. To finish off the craft students will use a crown template to create a crown for their frog. Our Ugly Duckling swan craft was created with one paper plate, a google eye and a scrap of orange paper. Students cut through the center of the plate until they get to the ridges on the other side. They then follow the ridges to cut out the neck and face. They can use the scrap plate to create the wing. Students place a bill and eye on the swan and voila, they have an adorable swan that didn't drive you bonkers. The Three Little Pigs Craft was created with a sheet of pink paper and google eyes. I give my students templates to cut out the circles and triangles. Once they glue the shapes together they can add eyes, nose and mouth. For this craft I provide students with: two rose printable, one/half Popsicle stick, one dot of clay, one cup and a circle. Students color the roses. When they are done they fold them in half and glue them together to make a 3d rose. Then they glue the rose to the stick. Once the rose dries they can use the clay to stick the rose onto the circle and place the glass on top. For an added bonus we give these roses to their moms for Mother's Day. The Snow White craft needs a small square of tin foil, a mirror template, blue paper and other decorating items in red and gold (if you want to stay with the Disney colors.). Students use the template to cut the mirrors out. Then they glue the foil to the back. Once done they go wild decorating them and you get a few minutes of peace before you think about how much the custodians are going to hate you. If you click on the link below you will find two weeks worth of my writing lesson plans and free materials. If you are in need of any print and go materials, templates or other fairy tale ideas, click below. The Fairy Tale Minute To Win It Unit is one of my student's favorites!! SaveSave
Anxiety among children is on the rise. We, as teachers, don't need a study to tell us this because we see it every day in the classroom. Splat the Cat is a great book to start a conversation about how we can handle anxiety. Watch the video below to see how to tie this book into standards. Be sure to check out my post on teacher anxiety if you think it will help. If you are experiencing teacher anxiety, check out this post.
The kids LOVED our character traits kick-off lesson this week! They each did an amazing job. To start the week off I explained to the kids that character traits were words that could describe us on the inside or outside. After brainstorming positive traits I had the kids make their own character traits on personal busts. This lesson led into more character trait lessons with picture books. Students were able to describe a character's actions in the beginning of a book through the end of the book. After they describe how the character changed or completed a character analysis. Character Traits With Mrs. Labrasciano After introducing personal character traits, we moved into Wemberly Worried. I have a student who is just like Wemberly! This was a great opportunity to help them through their anxiety and work on our comprehension at the same time. The kids love to put together projects so I made them a folder activity that helped us to see how Wemberly changes in the book. Wemberly Worried Wemberly Worried
Chinese New Year is a wonderful opportunity to bring engaging learning into the classroom! There is plenty of time for you to gather materials and make your lesson plans come alive for your students. The books shown above are wonderful books to teach your students in k-2 key details about Chinese New Year. The Dancing Dragon pulls out to show a huge 4' long Dragon Parade. I've yet to find another book that captivates students the way that The Dancing Dragon does when you pull out the dragon pages. Legend states that Buddha called all of the animals together to meet on the new year. Twelve animals showed at the meeting and Buddha named a year after each one. People born in these years are said to have the traits of the animals from their year. During the new year, people wear red and celebrate. One of the celebrations is the lantern festival. People join together with family, friends and their community to celebrate the lantern festival. There you will find beautifully decorated lanterns lit in a night parade. The highlight of the lantern festival is the dragon dance. Elaborate dances are put together with dazzling costumes. Firecrackers are lit to celebrate the new year. Every year we read books about Chinese New Year in my class. After we read about the new year, we make our own red lanterns and then we put on our own parade. One student is selected to lead the parade with a paper mask that I made. The rest of the students line up behind the leader with their arms on the person's shoulders in front of them. I throw my red blankets over them. They don't care that there are snowmen on them. We dance through the classroom stepping on bubble wrap for firecracker sounds. This is an excellent engagement activity. Afterwards the kids are ready to read more books closely and respond to text dependent questions. I only wish that we could teach this way every day! Above you will find a freebie that I'm offering you to compare the Chinese New Year to the North American New Year. (I didn't want to leave out my geographical surrounding friends!) If you find yourself short on time and would like more lesson suggestions and materials click on the link below.
We had a lot of fun in class this past week learning about American Symbols. Some of the activities that we did: Museum Walk- I put symbols around the classroom for the children to look at. For some of them it was their first time seeing some of the symbols. The kids glanced at the picture and then the name trying to create connections with their learning. Reading: We read lots of books to tell us the hows and whys of symbols. Did you know that Mt. Rushmore was created to draw in tourism? I guess I learned something too. Task cards: Once the students were familiar with the symbols and their facts, they worked with task cards. Video: We found a video on youtube that showed us a few of the symbols. This is the list of American symbols that I used: American Bald Eagle American Flag The White House The Liberty Bell The Statue of Liberty The Lincoln Memorial The Jefferson Memorial The Washington Monument Mt. Rushmore WW1 Memorial Presidential Seal Declaration of Independence Uncle Sam The Rose Airforce One Here are some of the books that we looked at. If you click on the photo below it will take you to the video on youtube. This pack contains more reading material and task cards that we used.
I'm so excited to participate in Tailor Made Teaching 's Summer Blog Hop. We end every year with kid created t-shirts in my classroom...
It's time to link up with my friend Julie from A First For Everything for the highs and lows of my week. My high for the week is that I got to spend some time with my fabulous new team. I made it through about half of their rooms to take pictures. Look at how cute they are! Hollywood Themed Classroom Hollywood Themed Classroom Peacock Classroom Student Work Camping Themed Classroom Camping Themed Classroom Sports Themed Classroom The Best Year Ever Teacher Shirt It was a definite high of the week when one of my former students brought me this awesome shirt. The low was that my Gators didn't get a chance to play because of a weather cancellation!
Getting Ready for First Grade First grade is an amazing year for children. It is awe inspiring to see how they grow from emergent rea...
My lessons and materials are ready for next week and I thought that I would share them with you in the hopes that it makes your life a li...
Boy is this week going to be fun!!! We are going to take some very difficult standards or level 3 cognitive difficulty standards to be exact and turn them into a week of hands on engagement. This week will also kick off a week and a half of monsters, bats and spiders!!!! Our ultimate goal is to have students understand strategies that will help them to identify the main purpose of a text, including what the author wants to explain. In order to do this, we will start the week off with a quick fact and opinion lesson. The students will work as a whole class to sort fact and opinion about a lovable green monster named Harry. Once they have the hang of it they will work in small groups to synthesize the information and write their own facts and opinions about another lovable monster named Sally (Harry and Sally! lol) The class will come together to wrap up the lesson with a little information about how author's use information and their opinions to write pieces. The next day will be a tiny detour from monster fun to read a piece on dental health. While it doesn't stick with the theme, it does a great job of guiding students through the whole standard with a purposeful text and aligned questions. Don't worry, you'll read below that students will spend time in writing doing awesome monster activities! We'll finish off the week with bats and spiders. The students will have to independently show that they understand the standard by writing and opinion piece and explaining it's purpose. Just for reference, if you don't know I use the letter t for teacher and ss for students in my outlines. Also, you can get the lesson plan templates that I use from A Modern Teacher. We are going to read the mentor text How To Catch A Monster on youtube this week. The students will be working on the writing crafts of vivid verbs and adjectives while writing a narrative. We'll kick the week off by having the students write a very detailed description of their monster with adjectives. Each student will then get a neighbor's description where they will have to draw the monster to an exact specification. The author will use the drawing to make revisions to their piece the next day and the drawing will happen a second time. Once all of the students have their monster descriptions written, they will write a narrative on how to catch the monster using vivid verbs. The students will have to have their pieces written and edited by Thursday. Everyone will take part in an author's share where they will present their piece to their friends. The best part is that they will have a drawing and a writing piece to hang up for all to see! Students who get finished early will be allowed to make a 2 minute bat or spider craft to put on their opinion writing. Click below to see how easy it is. If you would go to the first of the lesson outline series click here. To find this week's resources click below.
Are you in need of an expensive student gift? This one cost me $3 for 30 ornaments. You can personalize them with a vinyl cutter or by...
Well hello end of the year! With only two weeks left of teaching, the plans are to SURVIVE! Seriously though all activities will be whole group and easy. We will read a fairy tale, play a quiz game where I ask questions from the book and Dojo randomly selects students to answer. After the book we will make a craft. Then we will play minute to win it games and go through our writing unit. You can find the writing plans by clicking on last week's plans. Just like last week, we will not be writing anything during reading for Mrs. Labrasciano to grade. It's survival of the fittest friends and no one has time for a bunch of grading two weeks before school is out. Report card grades are due by Friday. Scroll down if you want to see my quick, easy and inexpensive crafts. Click back to last week if you want to see more fairy tale crafts. These eyes are so much fun and only cost $1. I bought a bag of gems from the Dollar Tree. I painted the black so that it would be dry in time to add color. Students use toothpicks to add yellow or other colors around the black. Once the second color dries they can go add a third color with a small paintbrush. In the picture above you'll see that I experimented with glitter, but I decided against allowing students to use it. These birds are so cute!! I used paper cups from the Dollar Tree along with scrap feathers and paper. You will also need google eyes. Students can put together any bird they like. They represent the birds that ate the bread crumbs that Hansel left behind.
The kids loved their hands-on time with inferencing this week! Inferencing Books Monday Monday I read a short story (pictureless) to them and we made a graphic organizer whole group. We put our evidence in one column. Showed our schema in the next column and placed our inference in the third. This chart is shown to the right of my word wall below. I apologize for the picture. This was the only picture that I had of the anchor. Inferencing Anchor Tuesday On Tuesday we read Henry and Mudge and made another class graphic organizer. This time we went down to a t-chart. We included evidence and our inference. After we worked as a class, we paired off and students rotated through inference bags. They were able to make t-charts in their reading notebooks to organize their information. Inferencing Bags Wednesday On Wednesday I read them a poem and they worked in a group to make inferences. They recorded their answers on a t-chart in their notebook. Afterwards, they went back into pairs to work through the inferencing bags. Inferencing Bags Thursday On Thursday we worked with wordless books. I modeled using "The Red Book". Afterwards, each group was given one book and they worked together to make inferences throughout. My planning partner Amanda, tabbed places in each book for them. The tabs were to show them great pages to infer. They did a wonderful job. The Red Book Friday Assessment day! Tests don't have to be boring or scary. On Friday I put "The Red Book" on the document camera. They used a t-chart to make inferences throughout. I was so proud that they each made an inference. One cutie even used her Writing Office to reference a contraction. Love her! Writing Offices Here's what they did every day: Every day they have to use the skill that we learned in shared reading during their independent reading time. So while they read, they also made inferences from their books. I met with them all individually to check in on them. These personal conferences helped me to gauge how much modeling I needed to do each day. Here are some other ideas that we didn't get to: There are quite a few inferencing lessons in Comprehension Connections. I love these lessons. I know that I had taught them the lessons last year in first grade so I went another route. We considered covering a Big Book and having them infer as you rip one piece of the paper off the cover at a time. My planning partner Amanda used the inferencing images to make a poster. Inferencing Work Inferencing Work A big thank you goes to Amanda who worked so hard to help me plan these lessons. The thank you will be continued through the year being that we will do it every week! Also thank you to Annie for sending me the pictures!
Do you have students who need a way to get out their fidgets, anxiety or extra energy while they're learning? A fidget ball may be just what they need. Read below to see how you can make them yourself. Supplies: balloons, sand, funnel, pen, scissors 1. Blow up balloons to stretch them out. 2. Place the stem of the balloon over the stem of the funnel. 3. Fill the balloon with a hand-full of sand. Use the pen to push the sand down if needed. 4. Tie the balloon and place another balloon over it with the stem facing the opposite way. 5. Cut the stem off. 6. Repeat steps 4 and 5. 7. Keep extra balloons on hand in case they become pierced. Make sure to follow all of the directions on the packages with safe balloon use. Below you will find some rules that will help keep you sane. 1. Students should leave the ball on a surface at all times. 2. Students should not pinch or poke the ball. 3. Students can roll the ball on their desk with their palm as long as they pay attention to their task. 4. Students can press the ball. 5. If students mistreat the ball it should be taken from them.
