The action cup is one of my favorite routines… particularly when it comes to getting my Kindergarten students to transition from their seats to the carpet seamlessly! I use the action cup in so many ways! I have an “Action Cup Helper” as a job. Each time we transition from one activity to the next, or […]
Looking for the top things to do in Siem Reap? Here are the places you need to add to your Siem Reap itinerary including the famous Angkor Wat!
The best hikes, activities, restaurants and cafes, as well as accomodation for the perfect day in Tofino. You cannot miss...
We all only have so much time, right? Here's what you need to focus on with your kids with dyslexia.
A crisis plan (sometimes called a safety plan) can sound intimidating, but think of it like a tool: a gameplan for navigating the worst days.
There are so many opportunities to assess learning. When do you assess learning? How do you assess learning. Here are a few of my favorites. Here are more places to find out about assessments. Enjo…
Would you like to decorate your classroom with fun, hand-drawn anchor charts/posters? Do you simply not have the time to get them done? Well, you have come to the perfect place! I love making these engaging and appealing anchor charts. I also can draw/create any other topic you would like, just contact me directly and ask! My students absolutely love these posters and references them every day. Many of them are visual learners, so the colorful images really help them connect and remember what they have learned. This particular anchor chart is for readers/writers practicing how to summarize. This helps them learn a strategy of how to include the characters, the problem, and the solution. It breaks summarizing down into 5 steps of how to do this, and helps them mentally imagine the beginning, the middle, and the end of a story! **These will be copies unless asked otherwise for a custom poster. They are not laminated, and are printed on normal, anchor chart paper. I ship these out ASAP after being ordered, but please keep in mind once shipped, it is outside of my control. Therefore, if shipping does not meet your expectations, I highly encourage you to please reach out to me first, and we have always been able to work something out to make up for anything that may have occurred after I have sent your package, thanks so much!! Hope you love it :)
Science is easy with this fun heat conduction experiment from the book Air is Not Oxygen!
A HANDY CHART FOR THOSE OF YOU WONDERING WHAT THE FUCK IS UP WITH THESE. NOTE THAT THESE ARE ALL THE INFORMAL AND YOU IS THE FORMAL SO LIKE YOU WOULD ALWAYS ADDRESS YOUR SUPERIOR/ OLDER PERSON/ SOCIAL...
Last year I didn't have a clue when RAK week was, not to mention that I was so swamped with starting a new position in January, that I didn'...
Practical prayer tools and actionable content that equips women to cut through the noise of everyday life and find fullness in the presence of the Lord.
Uluwatu is known for its picturesque landscape and with these things to do in Uluwatu you won't miss any of the best places to visit in Uluwatu.
A complete moving abroad checklist to help you prepare while you're still at home and to make your move as easy and stress-free as possible!
The best things to do in and around Garmisch, Germany! Each idea is good for traveling families and travelers without kids. No matter what time of year you visit, you will find plenty to do to keep you entertained. See our top 5 favorite things to do in the area!
Have you ever had those students that read beautifully, but haven't got a clue what they've read? They're probably in need of some serious Reading Strategies instruction.
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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Measurement and time are usually short lived in my room! That is unfortunate, but it is true. We spend a LOT of time on number sense, addition, subtraction, and place value that I feel like these three first grade standards get short-changed: 1. Nonstandard measurement and comparing/ordering of lengths 2. Telling Time to the half […]
Abacus - Place Value - Hundreds, Tens and Ones Worksheets / Printables There are 24 Worksheets used to teach children about hundreds, tens and ones on an abacus. Details provided below Write the number that is displayed on the abacus x 6 (8 per page) Draw the beads to represent the number on the abacus x 6 (8 per page) Write the number that is displayed on the abacus x 6 (15 per page) Draw the beads to represent the number on the abacus x 6 (15 per page) I hope you enjoy these worksheets. If you are looking for a more varied place value worksheets, I have included a few abacus worksheets in the place value sets below. Click here for Place Value – Hundreds, Tens and Ones . Click here Place Value – Tens and Ones . These resources can be used in a variety of ways, whole class lessons, independant learning, home work, home schools, and sub plans. Check out my store for more math resources Enjoy! Customer Tips: *** How to get TPT credits to use on future purchases *** Go to your My Purchases page. Beside each purchase you'll see a Provide Feedback button, click it and you will be taken to a page where you can leave a quick rating and a short comment about the product. Why is feedback so important? Each time you provide feedback, you’ll earn TPT credits that can be applied to future purchases to save you money! Plus, the feedback you provide helps me make my products better suit your needs! *** How To Follow My Store *** Click the green star beside my name at the top of this page OR at the top of my store page. Following me notifies you when I post a new item and you can get it half off for 24 hours! *** How To See All My Free Products *** To see all my free products in one place click here.
The best place to stay in Kyoto: 1) Downtown area 2) Kyoto Station area 3) Gion 4) Central Kyoto 5) Northern Higashiyama 6) Arashiyama
This week was our bear/hibernation theme. Lots of fun! If you have not read this book, you must! It is HILARIOUS! (Especially the ending... loved it! haha) Here are some of the nonfiction books we read this week to help us fill in our bear chart. We looked at these four types of bears: brown, black, polar, and panda. Here is the chart we created: When we talked about what bears ate, we did this fun little taste test/graphing activity that came from Rachelle over at What the Teacher Wants! Check out her bear unit here... super cute! I wish I had more time to do all of the activities. We tasted strawberry jam, tuna fish, and honey on crackers. We graphed our favourite bear food. Also included in Rachelle's unit, students coloured in their own graph and then answered questions about it. During our reading/writing time, we read the book "Goldilocks and the Three Bears". We compared it to the book "Growl!" and did a little T-chart about real vs. fantasy. The next day we read "The Three Snow Bears" and compared it with Goldilocks in a Venn Diagram. You can download the student version by clicking the picture below. We have been working on addition and just started talking about "Tens Partners". We created this rainbow anchor chart to help us remember them! In Rachelle's bear unit, she has this cute activity called "Bears in a Cave". One partner closes their eyes, the other partner uses bear counters (I used Teddy Graham crackers) and puts some in each circle. They write the total in the square at the end and then covers up one of the circles with a "cave" (paper cup or bowl). The other partner guesses how many bears are in the cave. You can use any number of bears. I had mine use all ten bears, so the sum always stayed 10. This was great practice for the "Tens Partners". When we started talking about hibernation, we read a book called "All About Hibernation". Then we created a large poster called "Where do animals go in the winter?". I got this idea from the very creative Amy over at Fun 4 Kids. See all of her winter animal ideas here! My students coloured the large background poster. Then they coloured the animals, cut them out with the labels, and glued them into the correct winter home. Then we added some cotton balls for snow! Super cute! If you would like a copy of the poster, click the pictures below. I print the background on white 11 x 17" paper. The animals/labels are on half of an 8.5 x 11". Amy also had a poem on her blog called "Winter Animals". It has some cute actions to go with it. We practiced the poem all week, then today we glued it into our poetry journals and illustrated it. Click above to download the poem. And last, but not least, we read the Bill Martin Jr. / Eric Carle books, "Brown Bear, Brown Bear", "Polar Bear, Polar Bear", and "Panda Bear, Panda Bear". Kids love the fun rhythm of these books. If you haven't checked out Mrs. Kacey @ Doodle Bugs Teaching, go there now! She has some amazing "Brown Bear, Brown Bear" centres and activities for FREE. Check here and here. I created an art lesson to go with these books. There is a simple pattern to use and you can create any of the four bears: brown, black, polar, or panda. Students use plastic combs (or a piece of cardboard) to create different paint techniques. Click on the picture below to download the full directions and patterns for free from TpT. These are the samples I created. I let the students choose any colour background. Here are my students working hard on their artwork. It was actually a pretty easy project to get all together. We did the painting one day and the assembly the next day. Here is the finally picture of them all together. (Our class is called 1T by the way, so the bulletin board makes sense....) They did such a good job! Although I don't know why a few of my bunnies thought that a blue marker was a good choice to use to draw the whole face.... hehe Have a great weekend, everybody!
When it’s time to teach my students to summarize, I love to use the Somebody Wanted But So Then (SWBST) strategy. Today I want to share a few tools you can use when teaching this reading strategy.
I haven’t had a good rant in a while, so I thought it was time…
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The Fishbowl Game is a fun-filled memory game that combines Charades, Password, and Taboo. It is easy to learn and perfect for large groups, which means
Would you like to decorate your classroom with fun, hand-drawn anchor charts/posters? Do you simply not have the time to get them done? Well, you have come to the perfect place! I love making these engaging and appealing anchor charts. I also can draw/create any other topic you would like, just contact me directly and ask! My students absolutely love these posters and references them every day. Many of them are visual learners, so the colorful images really help them connect and remember what they have learned. This particular anchor chart is for readers/writers learning all about the different parts of speech. My students always struggle with this skills, and easily confused the various parts of speech. They found this anchor chart for helpful, especially with the fun, engaging visuals! **These will be copies unless asked otherwise for a custom poster. They are not laminated, and are printed on normal, anchor chart paper. I ship these out ASAP after being ordered, but please keep in mind once shipped, it is outside of my control. Therefore, if shipping does not meet your expectations, I highly encourage you to please reach out to me first, and we have always been able to work something out to make up for anything that may have occurred after I have sent your package, thanks so much!! Hope you love it :)
Would you like to decorate your classroom with fun, hand-drawn anchor charts/posters? Do you simply not have the time to get them done? Well, you have come to the perfect place! I love making these engaging and appealing anchor charts. I also can draw/create any other topic you would like, just contact me directly and ask! My students absolutely love these posters and references them every day. Many of them are visual learners, so the colorful images really help them connect and remember what they have learned. This particular anchor chart is for readers/writers learning all about story elements. The puzzle visual really helps my students realize that there are pieces and parts that make up a story. They also love The Three Little Pigs and Big Bad Wolf so they really had fun with this! **These will be copies unless asked otherwise for a custom poster. They are not laminated, and are printed on normal, anchor chart paper. I ship these out ASAP after being ordered, but please keep in mind once shipped, it is outside of my control. Therefore, if shipping does not meet your expectations, I highly encourage you to please reach out to me first, and we have always been able to work something out to make up for anything that may have occurred after I have sent your package, thanks so much!! Hope you love it :)
Parchment documents relating to Galileo's heresy trial, the execution of Mary Queen of Scots and Henry VIII's divorce will go on display today in an unprecedented exhibition of 100 documents from the Vatican Secret Archives.
Blog post at The Passport Lifestyle : 22 Badass Jobs that Involve Travel Wish you could travel more but can't find the time or money? Join the club. Most of us aren't born bil[..]
Want to know how to factor polynomials? If you have had trouble in the past, you've come to the right place. GradeA breaks it down so that it is simple for anyone to understand
I wanted a place to post all of my anchor charts, so I decided to post them all here! As I get more, I will add to my collection. Enjoy!
Daugavpils, the second largest city in Latvia, is located on the banks of the Daugava River in the southeastern part of the country.
